The Dongfeng of the robot industry is coming, spurs new demand for high-tech robots

The global manufacturing industry is accelerating the transformation to informationization, intelligence, intelligence, and personalization. In this era, the robot industry is undergoing deep integration with innovative information technologies such as the Internet, big data, and artificial intelligence. It can be said that the world is ushering in a new round of technological revolution. The transformation and upgrading of traditional manufacturing industries has released huge market potential, spurred new demand for high-tech robots, and became a new impetus for accelerating industrial development. What challenges does the robotics industry face today and what are the future trends? How to solve it?

It is well known that industrial robots are strategic emerging industries that have clearly focused on the development of China's manufacturing power strategy in recent years, and their development level is an important indicator of the country's innovation ability and industrial development level. In recent years, with the in-depth implementation of China's industrial transformation and upgrading, in order to further enhance the national competitive position of intelligent manufacturing, China has continuously promoted the traditional manufacturing industry to accelerate the automation upgrade by replacing intelligent production equipment. Reduce production and labor costs, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency. The industrial robot industry has also ushered in opportunities. In fact, with the growth of the country, China has become the world's largest consumer of industrial robots for five consecutive years since 2013. This is an unquestionably high speed. But at this juncture of transformation in 2019, the government, industry, and academia circles should consider the direction and method of "high-quality development of the Chinese robot industry" from different angles.


Advantages and assistance

Let's first look at the advantages of local robotics companies. At present, China has made many efforts to promote the intelligent automation transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. First of all, the state has promulgated no less than 20 industrial policies on intelligent manufacturing, which have provided sufficient guarantees for the rapid development of the industrial robot industry in China, and promoted the technological progress and industrial upgrading of the industrial robot industry in China. These include the "Intelligent Manufacturing Development Plan (2016-2020)" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Finance, the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" National Science and Technology Innovation Plan issued by the State Council, and the "About Accelerating the Development of the New Generation of Artificial Intelligence" issued by the People's Government of Fujian Province. Implementation Opinions.

The Dongfeng of the robot industry is coming, spurs new demand for high-tech robots

Secondly, the layout of the industrial chain is gradually complete. With the active promotion of governments at all levels, China's industrial robot industry is developing rapidly and has formed a complete industrial chain layout. According to incomplete statistics, there are currently more than 60 robot parks in China, and the fields covered include robot body manufacturing, system integration, and core components.

In addition, the annual expansion of the industrial robot market, accelerated breakthroughs in core technologies, and strong capital support are all favorable conditions for the current development of the industrial robot industry. From 2016 to 2018, China's annual robot output increased from 70,000 to 140,000, with an average annual growth rate of more than 40%. In 2018, China's industrial robot installations were about 154,000 units, exceeding the number of robots in Europe and the Americas, ranking first in the world continuously, and becoming an important production base for global robots, especially the consumer market.

In addition, the density of industrial robots has increased rapidly. According to incomplete statistics, it reached 140 robots per 10,000 employees last year, three times that of 2015. At the same time, both in the industrial and service sectors, innovation capabilities have steadily improved, and new progress has been made in landmark achievements. For example, key technologies in industrial fields such as binocular vision positioning technology, flexible claw design technology, and dual-arm coordinated control technology for dual-arm robots. Public service robots implement functions such as face, voice recognition tracking, and environmental detection. Face recognition accuracy Up to 90%; some key component technologies have also made breakthroughs.

In addition, in recent years, there are 82 national standards related to industrial robot recommendations, 11 industry standards, and more than 20 group standards, which initially cover some basic standards of the standard system, component standards, and system integration standards.

On the whole, the development of industrial robots has a foundation, resources, and a market. It can be said that the future of industrial robots is a blue ocean. However, in fact, everything is ready and it is only due to the east wind.

Problems and challenges

At present, China's industrial robot manufacturers are mainly concentrated in the field of system integration, and their products are mainly low-end products such as handlers, palletizing robots, and sorting robots, especially in the automotive and electronic information industries, accounting for 60%. In the high-end areas such as collaborative robots, there is still a big gap with mainstream international manufacturers such as ABB, Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, etc., which leads to insufficient domestic market competition between domestic manufacturers and foreign manufacturers. Although China has developed into the world's largest industrial robot application market, in terms of market share, the share of domestic industrial robots is still low.

Especially since this year, the robot industry is facing downward pressure, and some core technologies and key technology components are still subject to people. At the same time, affected by the main application market of robots such as cars and their components, the growth rate of robots has also declined.

In terms of corporate concepts, many companies always want to "low-cost strategy", to do industrial robots through subsidies, loss of money, burn money, blindly superstitious "the power of price, want to use this to obtain financing, pursue the results of low-cost strategy, will make The industry is not profitable on a large scale. At the same time, most robot companies want to be large and comprehensive, but robot technology is a multi-disciplinary integrated technology. No matter how big the enterprise is, they want to do everything. As a result, they ca n’t. Failure to do well and not doing well leads to unclear market segmentation and great competition.

Opportunity and progress

But one year is about to pass. After the cold, many industry companies based on in-depth thinking about the industry and predict the future have become more calm, more mature, confident, and based on their own advantages, characteristics, The location has found an accurate positioning for its own growth and development, more and more in line with the law of market development. At the same time, it is worth mentioning that the multi-joint robot has grown rapidly for three consecutive years, ranking first in sales, accounting for 51.7% of the total sales in the first half of the year. In addition, the share of independent brands is increasing, especially the sales of processing robots has more than doubled.

Yu Leng happened to be a golden period for the robot industry to optimize its structure and achieve healthy development. From a domestic perspective, the application fields and scenarios continue to expand, and the development of robots is still strong. With the advancement of intelligent manufacturing, industrial robot applications are rapidly moving from the automotive and electronics industries to metallurgy, light industry, metal processing, petrochemicals, food and beverage, and medicine , Health, and other industries. Industries such as metal processing, plastics and chemistry, especially the food industry, have grown very rapidly in recent years. In addition, the number of service robots is increasing. Life, medical, special robots, agricultural robots, construction robots, etc. all have great potential.

It can be seen from a lot of public data that the application industry has expanded from 87 middle-classes in the national economy in 2015 to 47 major-classes and 129 middle-classes in 2018. Especially in the ceramic sanitary ware, smelting, brewing, non-woven fabrics and other sub-fields, the application of robots has already achieved initial results. At the same time, robots in the service area extend from robots such as sweeping and cleaning in the past to education, medical care, escort, and distribution, and are gradually covering our home, shopping malls, schools, hospitals, banks, hotels and other application scenarios. With the breakthrough of key technologies such as positioning and navigation of new materials and power control, special robots have formed a product system represented by underwater robots, security inspection robots, and curtain wall cleaning robots. Among them, service robots will become an important battlefield for the world's robot powers to compete for the dominance of emerging industries, and the status of special robots will be prominent.

Therefore, domestic enterprises have also started to accept domestic industrial robot products with a more positive and inclusive attitude, and assisted the accumulation of domestic industrial robot manufacturing process foundations in the actual application. Road Overtaking "provides opportunities. All these are the valuable experience and the basis of progress for a country and a nation after long-term accumulation.

The Dongfeng of the robot industry is coming, spurs new demand for high-tech robots

Trends and possibilities

What development trends will the robot industry present in the future? According to the Global Robotics 2019 report released by the International Robotics Federation, IFR predicts that with continuous automation and technological improvements, double-digit growth will resume from 2020 to 2022, with an average annual rate of 12%. Robot sales will grow by 32%. The logistics industry may account for the largest share, accounting for 41% of total sales, followed by some detection and maintenance robots, which may account for nearly 40%. Sales of service robots for personal and home use will also increase by 15% to $ 3.7 billion.

In the past three to forty years, the replacement rate was less than a few percent, and it will reach 30% in the next five to eight years. China ’s market space is huge. With changes in manufacturing models, such as smart manufacturing, industry 4.0, and the interconnection of everything, With regard to the emergence of human labor force effects, future trends and directions, including historical development data, China's industrial robots will enter a large explosive period.

Technology is also accelerating the industry. For Chinese companies, especially latecomers, they are facing a period of significant technological opportunities, including AI, perception, network, data, including edge computing, new materials, etc., which will be a good time to "overtake the curve". And various new robots in the future will need scenarios to trial and error iterate, and China's huge market is also a unique advantage.

It can be seen that at present, robots and emerging technologies continue to merge, pushing the industry into the fast track. China has a large-scale market advantage. With 5G communication, the industrial Internet and robot technology integration will effectively and significantly improve the real-time, integrity and storage of data transmission, and greatly enhance the robot's intelligence, flexibility and accuracy. The control ability will help to greatly increase the application potential of our robots and push the robots into the fast lane of development.

Planning and landing

How to promote high-quality development of the robot industry in the future? This is something that both businesses and governments need to consider. During a recent public event held in Chongqing, Luo Junjie, deputy director of the Equipment Industry Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China, spoke on behalf of the government about his three thoughts on “advancing the high-quality development of the robot industry”:

The first is to pay attention to the use of new development concepts to promote the coordinated development of industrial innovation. We must pay attention to open cooperation and green coordinated development, strengthen “introduction” and “go global”, actively carry out international exchanges, promote vertical and horizontal cooperation in the industrial chain, accelerate the establishment and improvement of the industrial innovation system, strengthen R & D investment, and continuously improve technological and model innovation capabilities , Accelerate the development and promotion of high-end industrial robots, service robots, and special robots.

The second is to focus on strengthening basic capabilities and improving the modernization level of the industrial chain. Luo Junjie said that it is necessary to accelerate breakthroughs in core technologies such as high-precision reducers for robots, high-speed high-performance controllers, high-performance servo motors and drives, sensors, and operating systems; strengthen the research and development of basic common technologies for robots, and break through human-computer interaction, compliance control, Cutting-edge technologies such as functional bionics and intelligent perception; should be guided by market demand, strengthen collaboration between ontology companies, component companies, integrators and user companies, and promote close collaboration in all aspects of product development, component matching, manufacturing, and application implementation , Integrated development, and win-win cooperation, and build a robot technology integration and innovation ecosystem.

The third is to focus on improving quality brands and improving the sustainable development of the industry. For example, we need to further promote the improvement of robot standards and testing and certification systems.

And integration is an important path for manufacturing digitalization, and integration is the core of intelligent manufacturing. For the robot industry, synergy and win-win situation must be achieved in particular: "five integrations": the first is the robot industry and new technologies emerging today, such as integration with artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing; the second is the robot industry Integrate with work and service fields, such as the automotive industry and metal products industry; the third is the integration of intelligent manufacturing, intelligent transformation, and digital transformation that is currently being vigorously promoted; the fourth is that the robot industry itself has various technical components and has key components There is also the integration of systems and other aspects; the fifth is to integrate with humans to create robots that are harmonious and cooperative.

The above-mentioned Dongfeng from multiple dimensions is the fundamental point to make the robot industry rise again in the new year!