Improve the level of industrial automation

At the sixth Digital China Construction Summit in April, Zhang Yong, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Board of Directors and CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, revealed that Alibaba Cloud engineers are experimenting with connecting the Thousand Questions large model to an industrial robot, and entering a human language in the Dingding dialog box can remotely direct the robot to work.

This also means that the birth of large AI models brings new possibilities for industrial robots. According to Alibaba Cloud engineers, large models can play an important role in both the development and application stages of robots. In the robot development stage, engineers can automatically generate code instructions through the large model to complete the development and debugging of robot functions, and even create some new functions for the robot, such as the robot can grasp, move and other basic capabilities of arbitrary combination arrangement, so as to complete more complex tasks; In the production run, Qianwen large model for the robot to perform tasks to provide the ability to reason and make decisions, front-line workers only need to send a text, Qianwen can understand the intention of the task reasoning, and automatically translated into the machine can understand the code, command the machine to perform tasks, effectively improve production efficiency.

Wu Qilin said that there has always been a pain point in industrial production, that is, in robot programming and process debugging, programming time is long, and deployment costs are high, but AI large models are expected to solve this problem.

“For example, in the painting process, whether we can enter user parameters after some model training in the future, it will automatically generate a group of control robot trajectory and control process equipment, on this basis, and then make some fine tuning or mechanization debugging, so that the entire programming and application become simpler and faster.” Next, we can further integrate the whole process upgrading and process programming with the AI model.”

Wang Xiaoling, managing partner of Times Bole, pointed out in an interview with a Securities Times reporter that an important application link of AI large model in the industrial field is to enhance the level of industrial automation with the help of massive industrial data. “For a simple example, it can be of great help in the field of industrial manufacturing, first of all in the field of machine vision, because machine vision used to be limited by the entire computing power and the limits of the algorithm, there is no way to truly realize the autonomous judgment of the behavior of an object, more according to the established operational instructions.” If the AI large model is connected to machine vision, it can efficiently complete some disorderly grasping and put it in the right place, which is a typical use case.”

Wang Xiaoling said that with the improvement of overall data computing power, AI large models can also implement learning-based control system (PNC) plans in unmanned factories. For example, according to the customer orders, production scheduling and inventory of inventory history, it can be very accurate to determine when to place orders and when to produce, replacing the production plan based on human experience in the past, so that the entire production efficiency has been greatly improved.

Change is happening

In recent years, with the continuous development and application of AI technology, the field of industrial production and high-end manufacturing has gradually begun to realize intelligent transformation. More and more enterprises hope to reduce cost and increase efficiency and improve product quality by introducing this technology.

Policy emphasis on artificial intelligence and AI large models is also rising. On April 28, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee mentioned that it is necessary to attach importance to the development of general artificial intelligence and create an innovation ecology; On May 5, the 20th Central Financial and Economic Commission held the first meeting, the meeting mentioned that the new generation of information technology and other strategic emerging industries are an important force to guide the future economic and social development, to grasp the wave of new scientific and technological revolution such as artificial intelligence.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day. Although AI grand models are expected to set off a new round of industrial revolution, this is a gradual process, not overnight.

“The real application of AI large models to industrial production and high-end intelligent manufacturing will be very fast, and the promotion may be as rapid as the popularization of early smart machines.” Wang Xiaoling said, but it has two bottlenecks to solve, the first is the computing power, this large-scale computing power can be solved at a lower cost through the cloud. The more difficult point is data collection, because the overall degree of data in the industrial field is not high, and more human input is required. Visualizing and digitizing production operations is expected to take five to ten years.

Wang Xiaoling believes that for the traditional manufacturing industry, there are many sensors and micro servers to capture these data, and then upload them to the cloud after combing, which is a huge upgrade. But this requires manufacturing companies to invest a lot of capital to achieve, need long-term profit accumulation, and private equity financing or listing support will be gradually applied.

In the face of increasingly complex industrial production and high-end manufacturing, AI large models also need to overcome one specific difficulty after another. Han Zhuo, chief development officer of Mecamander Robotics, said: “I have visited about 200 factories in the past two years, and our character is always inside the factory. In the field of AI+ manufacturing, everyone says it is a trillion-level market, but from a developer’s point of view, we think it may be more like a trillion-level market, because there are a lot of non-standard applications.”

“Many overseas industrial robot companies into the Chinese market will find the soil is not suitable, this is because in the West management, production is standardized, but in the Chinese market, whether management or factories have a large number of non-standard demand.” “What we are able to do now is to face all kinds of non-standard, granular applications that can be solved in a standardized way,” Mr. Hendra said.