From science fiction to reality from virtual to entity

New thinking for the smart service robotics industry 2014 was the beginning of the rise of smart robots. In 10 years, through virtual and physical infiltration into all walks of life and aspects of human life, a seemingly sci-fi concept is moving into real life. For example, the first domestic bank entity smart robot and the previous softbank silver release were released and demonstrated at the event.

Serving robots, intelligence is the biggest feature. An industrial robot is a programmable and multi-functional manipulator that sets and changes actions in advance to perform different tasks. Different from industrial robots, the biggest difference between service robots is intelligence. There are three main characteristics, namely perception, movement and thinking. Core barriers are the ability to solve thinking and follow-up feedback. It involves two aspects, the first is the use of speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language understanding, independent cloud computing and other basic technologies and multi-dimensional features of the emotional analysis technology for effective identification, and the second is the development of intelligent voice services based support and interaction platform. Therefore, domain semantic database, smart big data and industrial application are the key elements for forming a core competitive advantage.

Grasping the technology of thinking and feedback, Chinese companies have the competitive advantage of developing a service robot industry. Currently, there are companies with first-mover advantage in the field of Chinese speech recognition, focusing on the research and development of core interactive technologies for intelligent robots. Its enterprise-level platforms, standardized platforms, and cloud service platforms can cover all types of customers, and have advanced Chinese intelligent human-machine dialogue engines. Human-computer interaction technology, and deposits large-scale domain knowledge bases and semantic libraries in fields such as communications and finance.

Intelligent service robots have the potential to become the next generation of Internet terminals. They will duplicate the process of personal computers entering the family in the past decades. It is a high-probability event that the industry growth space is “ten years of ten years”.

Specific analysis is as follows:

1. Serving robots are divided into professional service robots and home service robots. They have a wide range of applications and are mainly engaged in maintenance, repairs, transportation, cleaning, security, rescue, and monitoring. The market has great potential. According to IFR statistics, the cumulative sales of professional service robots have exceeded 126,000 units since 1998. As of the end of 2012, the sales volume of military robots, field robots, medical robots, and logistics robots were 6,200, 5, 300, 1,308, and 1,376 respectively, of which the number of logistics use robots accounted for only 9% of professional service robots and sales were about 200 million US dollars. According to IFR, logistics, military industry, and medical use have greater growth potential in the future.

2. In addition to the basic technology of industrial robots, service robots are still in the stage of technological development and breakthrough in the aspects of walking, running, vision, artificial intelligence analysis and judgment, and bionics, and the whole is not yet mature. Serving robotics technology will be the commanding height of global technology competition in the future. Chinese enterprises have made great progress in Chinese speech interaction and visual recognition. The growth of follow-up industry demands depends on the combination of software and hardware intelligence capabilities and the speed of cost-effectiveness enhancement.

3. In addition, we think that service robots will also be widely used in automation factories, automated logistics, and other fields in the future. However, the cost-effectiveness of “machine substitution” determines the growth rate of its demand.