As the world's largest robot application market, does China have an advantage in developing humanoid robots?
Previously, Japan, the United States, and the European Union were all early major players in the field of humanoid robots. Tesla's humanoid robot "Optimus Prime" prototype, released in September, is aimed at everyday production life. Asimo, the representative product of Japan's Honda, can complete movements such as going up and down stairs and running. Atlas, developed by Boston Dynamics in the United States, can complete difficult actions such as starting and turning in place for a week, and is currently mainly focused on scientific research.
China has become the world's largest robot market. According to the China Robot Industry Development Report (2022), it is expected that by 2022, the scale of China's robot market will reach 17.4 billion US dollars, with an average annual growth rate of 22% in five years.
China attaches great importance to the field of humanoid robots. The "Hui Tong" series of Beijing Institute of Technology, the "Wukong" series of Zhejiang University, and the Walker series of Shenzhen Youbi are the leaders in China's humanoid robots, and local technology enterprises such as Xiaomi and Dataran have crossed the border to further promote the development of China's humanoid robots.
For example, the Walker has achieved 4 major iterations, equipped with 41 high-performance servo joints, to achieve smooth and fast walking and accurate and safe interaction, and can provide intelligent and warm services in a variety of scenarios.
China has initially formed a complete robot industry chain. Xin Guobin, Vice minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that the basic capability of China's robot industry has been significantly improved, and core components such as precision reducer, high-performance servo drive, intelligent controller, and new sensors have made a stage breakthrough, which has been widely recognized by domestic and foreign machine enterprises.
Key components such as servo motors, gear reducers, control systems, drives and machine vision account for more than 70% of the cost of humanoid robots. Huang Xiaoqing, founder and CEO of the company, said that the technology gap between China and foreign countries is gradually narrowing, and the intelligent flexible joint (SCA) independently developed by the company is only 1/10 of the traditional server system under the same performance.
A study by Zheshang Securities shows that in the field of harmonic reducer, with the breakthrough of key technologies, the competitiveness of Chinese domestic manufacturers has increased significantly, and the market share of "green harmonic" in 2021 has reached 25%, ranking second in the world.
However, making humanoid robots achieve technological upgrades requires the integration of technologies such as autonomous driving, visual navigation, and sensors. China has an advantage in artificial intelligence.
At present, the multi-modal large models published by Google, Baidu, Huawei and other enterprises are exploring the direction of general artificial intelligence. Huang Xiaoqing said that the "cloud brain" built by Da for robots is based on the multi-modal large model of AI neural networks with hundreds of billions of parameters to build general artificial intelligence for robots, so that robots can establish huge neural network models on their own.
Xiong Youjun, chief technology officer of Youjun Technology, told the China News Service reporter that Chinese enterprises continue to accumulate the core technology of the full stack of humanoid robots, and are one of the few countries in the world that can produce humanoid robots. In the humanoid robot market, they have taken the first-mover advantage basically consistent with developed countries, and they got a better card than new energy vehicles.
China's shortcomings are also obvious. Yin Chuanhao, senior analyst of the Policy Research and International Cooperation Center of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, believes that China has made a stage breakthrough in the field of key components, which provides a good industrial foundation for the development of humanoid robots, but the research and development direction and path of scientific research institutions and enterprises have different focuses, and the lack of coordination of resource utilization, which leads to China's difficult to form a polymerization effect in the field of humanoid robots.
Xiong Youjun believes that the gap between China and developed countries in chip and miniaturized hydraulic technology is systematic, and the gap between other parts is smaller. But China's robot industry has basically formed a whole industrial chain system from parts to machines to integrated applications, this advantage no other country can replace, the future of humanoid robots to see China.
Article source: China News Network
