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“From the perspective of the industry, it has been greatly affected by the epidemic, the flow of personnel is weak, and the resumption of work of upstream and downstream companies is not ideal, including some customers, which may be in a difficult period. But overall, unmanned is a trend. And the other side of the epidemic will, to some extent, accelerate the maturation of the entire industry.”

In the face of the epidemic, mobilerobotWhen it comes to the impact of the industry, Wu Yonghai, vice president of Hikvision Robotics, said in an interview. In Wu Yonghai’s view, although the development of the industry will encounter difficulties during the epidemic period, the overall situation is optimistic and positive.

Wu Yonghai is the vice president of Hikvision Robotics and a research doctor in the robotics industry. He has a deep understanding and research on the mobile Robot Industry. Therefore, Yiou Kechuang had a comprehensive exchange with him on the technology, products, market and other aspects of the mobile robot industry.

Although the field of mobile Robots is in the early stage, the development trend is good

When it comes to the topic of mobile robots, it is always inseparable from the “Amazon acquisition of Kiva” event. The small and flexible appearance of mobile robots and the unmanned scene employment have made many entrepreneurs and investors see the opportunity.

Since 2013, the mobileRobot marketThe development is in full swing, the foundation in terms of technology and products is also more solid, and the market has also expanded overseas. Wu Yonghai said: “At present, the mobile robot industry is developing well, but it is still in a relatively early stage, and the overall market size is relatively small. Players in this field are still in a state of going hand in hand, and each has its own strengths and advantages.“.

When Yiou Kechuang asked where Haikang Robot was in the industry, Wu Yonghai said without hesitation: “From the perspective of the company’s development in the past two years, it is in a relatively front-line position, because the company’s reputation in the industry is still in the forefront. Not bad, so gradually the brand has risen.”

Yiou Kechuang learned that Hikvision Robot was originally Hikvisionmachine visionThe business department, whose technology R&D can share technology with Hikvision’s R&D team and Hikvision Research Institute.Relying on Hikvision’s years of technology accumulation in image sensing, artificial intelligence, big data analysis and other fields, the main business layout of Hikvision Robot is in mobile robots, machine vision, industry-leveldronethree areas.

At present, the Hikvision Robotics team has more than 1,500 people, and has developed into a global mobile robot, machine vision product and algorithm platform and provider. The company is committed to continuously promoting machine intelligence and leading a new era of intelligent manufacturing. Wu Yonghai said that the company is still in the investment stage. In recent years, the company has developed rapidly, and the mobile robot business has covered thousands of customers.

Faced with the market competition of more established companies in the same industry, such as Xinsong and Kunzhou Shipbuilding, Wu Yonghai said, “The company still pays more attention to itself. After all, everyone has different advantages and strengths in their respective fields. The industry plate is relatively small, and the growth is relatively fast, each specializing in its own field.”

Product standardization is an important prerequisite for market scale landing

According to Yiou Kechuang, in the mobile robot industry, people generally pursued personalized customized solutions in the early years, but with the acceleration of the mobile robot industry, the problems of product popularity and standardization have become increasingly prominent. Product universality mainly refers to a product that can be applied in multiple scenarios, while standardization refers to standardization for the applicable scenarios of the product, and the use compatibility is stronger.

Wu Yonghai believes that standardization is very important, and the company is also doing this. With standards, the industry can develop more healthily. For customers, it is difficult to form large-scale applications without standards. At present, the standardization of mobile robots is still at a very early stage, and there is still a lot of standardization work to be done in terms of Industrial Robotic arms and industrialized high-end equipment.

ifThere is no standardization in the industry, although it is not chaotic, but everyone is doing their own thing. This is a big problem, which will lead to limitations in the products used by customers, such as: product incompatibility, single application scenario.

Furthermore, from an industry perspective,Without standardization, it will cause a lot of waste, just like the suppliers of core components, each supplier’s products are different, which will lead to a lot of repetitive work.. Not only is the efficiency low, but also the cost is high, so that the competitiveness of the industry is weakened. Therefore, standardization can improve production efficiency and reduce production costs. “The standardization of the auto industry is better.” Wu Yonghai added.

Of course, in addition to industry standardization issues, Wu Yonghai said that now the entire industry is also encountering bottlenecks: first, the incremental market is not easy to do, and each company serves limited customers. When the service reaches a certain stage, many value-added services will There are problems, if breakthroughs can be made, there will be greater development; secondly, robot intelligence needs to increase technology research and development efforts to improve control, flexibility, perception, and decision-making capabilities; finally, product needs to be expanded.

Today, customers pay more attention to how much value they can bring to themselves and the return on investment in terms of products and solutions. Such as manpower saving, product quality improvement, management quality improvement, how much inventory is reduced, how many intermediate links are reduced, whether operating costs will be greatly reduced, and how much will the overall effect be improved. Therefore, for an enterprise that is relatively mature in informatization and IT, standardization is very important, and it is easier to apply products on a large scale.

Mobile robot market: Expected 40% YoY Growth in 2020

Fortunately, domesticIndustrial RobotAlthough the industry started relatively late compared to foreign countries, it is indeed ahead of foreign countries in the field of mobile robots. Wu Yonghai analyzed that the foreign industrial robot industry is developing very well, and there are also many competitive companies with rapid technological changes, but there has been no in-depth development and detailed exploration in the field of mobile robots, and the scale is generally relatively small. China is at the forefront in this regard. , more advanced than foreign development.

The main reason is that,Foreign companies believe that the mobile robot market is relatively small and non-standardized. Large companies hardly invest much, and it is all small and medium-sized enterprises.In the past 4-5 years, China has developed rapidly. Many new products and technologies have been developed, and a large number of enterprises have also emerged. Foreign countries have done it early, but there has not been much investment and no research and development of related new products..

In addition, the core components of mobile robots,At present, domestic development has basically met the accuracy requirements in all aspects. The core components are still mainly domestically produced, and there is less competition from foreign companies in this field, leaving a window for domestic innovative companies to survive.. In addition to the strong domestic market demand, suppliers continue to invest in product technology, which is very competitive in the world.

Having said this, Wu Yonghai also revealed to Yiou Kechuang that the annual market size of the mobile robot field is about 5 billion yuan, but the applications are only concentrated in the use of leading enterprises, and some small and micro enterprises or small and medium-sized enterprises have relatively few applications. and mentioned,Robots are a category of automation equipment. The premise of application is that the informatization of enterprises and IT systems must keep up. Now many enterprises informatization have not kept up with the pace of technology.. On the contrary, the market will become wider and wider.

Furthermore, domestic enterprises have different degrees of informatization, and the production level still has management inertia, and there will be a relatively long wait-and-see and evaluation period before adopting the robot system.

Even so, Wu Yonghai is still optimistic, he said: “The entire mobile robot field is still in a state of rapid growth. In 2019, it will grow by about 40%, and the market size will be about 5 billion yuan. It is expected to increase by 40% in 2020, and the market size will reach 7 billion yuan.“

Finally, Wu Yonghai said to Yiou Kechuang: “The focus of mobile robots is mainly in the second half of the year. Affected by the epidemic, the industry and enterprises will be relatively difficult in the first half of the year, but there will be a great turnaround in the second half of the year, and the overall development trend is still showing a good momentum. .”