Some companies have increased technology research and development, and some companies have increased industrialization with large-scale fixed asset investment. On January 3 and 4, the two major Tesla automobile supporting suppliers, Topu Group and Sanhua Intelligent Control successively announced a total scale of more than 10 billion yuan of robot production base investment plan, which is considered by the industry to be a landmark event in the approaching commercialization process of humanoid robots.
Driven by the demand for digital transformation of thousands of industries, humanoid robots, as the new star of artificial intelligence (AI), have attracted heavy players including Xiaomi and Bytedance. IPO, technology increase, product iteration, heavy investment... At the start of 2024, the new Blue Ocean of humanoid robots will set off waves, leading a group of players into the golden track leading to the next technological era.
The inflection point with the help of the big model
In the Tesla A-share industry chain, two heavy investments appeared almost at the same time, with A total scale of more than 10 billion yuan.
On January 4, Topu Group announced that it signed the "Investment Agreement on Robot electric drive System Research and Development Production base Project" with the Management Committee of Ningbo Economic and Technological Development Zone, and the company intends to invest 5 billion yuan to build the robot core parts production base. The investment in the construction of a robot electric drive system R & D and production base can land the company's robot-related technologies and products and achieve commercial and large-scale production.
A day earlier, thermal management leader Sanhua Intelligent Control and its holding subsidiaries signed an investment agreement with the Management Committee of Hangzhou Qiantang New District, with a planned total investment of no less than 5 billion yuan. Among them, the company plans to invest in the construction of robot electromechanical actuators and domain controller R & D and production base projects in Qiantang District, with a planned total investment of no less than 3.8 billion yuan.
Whether the investment involves humanoid robots, the two companies are currently silent to reporters. However, on the one hand, the two companies are Tesla's supporting suppliers in China, on the other hand, from the amount and volume, the scale of investment is only through industrial robots or difficult to digest, so many industry insiders will point to the two plans for the forward-looking layout of the field of humanoid robots.
This pulls out the market judgment that humanoid robots will usher in key nodes of industrialization this year. Earlier, Tesla released the second-generation Optimus robot video, and the market gave a judgment: compared with the Atlas cost of $1 million, Optimus may be reduced to tens of thousands of dollars, indicating that humanoid robots are possible to mass production.
The rise of humanoid robots, as well as the intensity of mass production expectations, largely comes from the outbreak of AI large models, especially the breakthrough of the underlying ability of AI large models has significantly promoted the development of the frontier technology of "embodied intelligence", and the combination of humanoid robot technology has spawned more possibilities.
"Humanoid robots have been around the world for decades, but they are still a long way from landing. With the breakthrough of the underlying capabilities of AI large models, IFlytek saw the application potential of large models in humanoid robots and decided to start the layout." Ji Chao told reporters.
Ji Chao's team saw the amazing performance of large models in general AI in 2022, and began to think about what changes would occur when robots broke through the underlying capabilities of general AI. The large model has high-level capabilities such as language understanding, logical reasoning, multimodal, etc., which can make the robot have a smarter "brain" and have the "brain power" to understand and plan, while the humanoid robot takes into account the basic functions of movement and operation, and the shape is the most suitable for the human-centered environment for a long time, and has good universal attributes. This is regarded as one of the most ideal carriers of general AI, which is also an important reason why iFlyTek decided to develop humanoid robots in 2022.
In October last year, IFLYtek humanoid robot products were officially unveiled, which is the industry's first integrated fully autonomous domestic spark cognition large model of embodied intelligent humanoid robots, complex task dismantling accuracy of 95%, open scene object recognition success rate of 85%. Iflytek also released the long-term strategic goal of using humanoid robots as traction to promote the "visual-language-action" multimodal embodied intelligence large model.
Industrialization has exceeded expectations
According to the previous planning of the competent authorities, by 2025, China's humanoid robot innovation system will be initially established; The whole machine products reach the international advanced level, and achieve mass production; It is also clear that the humanoid robot's human-machine-environment integration interaction ability is improved to support the full-scene landing application.
For the humanoid robot market in 2024, the market previously generally believed that the humanoid robot technology level is still in the initial stage, the industry as a whole is in the early stage of development, and the commercialization process is facing multiple tests such as cost, reliability and functional practicality.
However, from the actions of many companies such as Topu Group and Sanhua Intelligent Control, some changes are emerging, and the mass production and industrialization of humanoid robots are expected to exceed previous expectations.
On the last trading day of 2023, Youmust select to land on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. At the listing ceremony, the humanoid robot Youyou walked onto the stage and handed the gong hammer to the chairman of the board of directors, and another humanoid robot Walker S made his debut, holding another gong hammer and ringing the opening gong together. This is the first time in human history that a humanoid robot has played a gong.
There are many recent signs that some companies' humanoid robot products have locked in scenario validation. The humanoid robot developed by China Electric Science 21 is expected to be put into the intelligent logistics production scene in the first quarter of this year to do application verification and find problems in the application. Zhiyuan robot executives have revealed that the company's commercial landing is first aimed at intelligent manufacturing scenarios, such as the automobile manufacturing industry. In addition, there are some companies trying to find landing opportunities in the cleaning industry or home smart elderly care.
Some institutional analysts believe that in the industry actively explore the commercialization path, intelligent manufacturing or will become the field of large-scale application of humanoid robots, family services from a long-term perspective is one of the most potential application scenarios, in 2024, humanoid robots or will usher in the first year of scale commercialization.
Future new terminal
Humanoid robot industrialization has evolved beyond expectations, and a number of companies have become fans.
On January 2, Super Jet Shares announced the first record of investor relations activities this year. Although the company's downstream focus is mainly on the automotive industry, humanoid robots have become one of the core topics of concern for investors.
Some investors asked, in the future to make a breakthrough in the field of humanoid robots, what are the advantages of super Jie shares? The company replied that customer resources, technology accumulation, quality control capabilities, production capacity supply, etc. are advantages. The company takes the field of humanoid robots as an important direction for future development. Because the fasteners and connectors used by robots are relatively more precise, the technical difficulty will be higher, and the company focuses on small and medium-sized precision fasteners and connectors. Relatively speaking, the company's products have more advantages.
Johnson Shares, Bowei Alloy, Gu high-tech and other companies have also announced the exploration, research and development, layout and other relevant information in the field of humanoid robots. In addition to industrial chain companies, manufacturing and Internet giants such as Xiaomi and Bytedance with stronger comprehensive strength have also stepped into this track, and together with foreign Amazon, OpenAI, Samsung, etc., they are racing the waves in the global industrial development of humanoid robots.
Xiaomi is now actively promoting the phased landing of humanoid robots in its own manufacturing system. According to its planning, it will be divided into three steps: take root in a certain scene in the short term to achieve multi-functional product technical verification; Integrate millet manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing and other scenarios to do industrial verification in the medium term; In the long term, Xiaomi hopes to expand the application and value realization of robots in more scenarios outside of 3C and automotive manufacturing scenarios, forming a 7:2:1 "golden rule" - 70% of the work is completed by automated equipment, 20% is completed by humanoid robots, and the remaining 10% is completed by humans.
The reason why Dachang and A-share leaders are distributed is because the "chain master" role of humanoid robots is strong. In contrast to traditional robots that perform specific operations based on specific plans, humanoid robots not only interact with the physical world, but also have the ability to perceive and understand.
According to the relevant people of the China Academy of Information and Communication, "perception" allows AI to learn human cognition of the world, and "generation" allows AI to have the ability to make independent decisions. These are the foundations for humanoid robots. At the same time, humanoid robots need to interact with the real physical world, which also requires real-world parametric training. In addition, due to the existence of hardware products, it will touch the low-cost mass production as a manufacturing industry.
Ji Chao believes that hardware stability is the key to the implementation in place, and how to complete the dismantling and planning of a series of complex tasks will be the upper limit brought by large models and embodied intelligence. Both aspects are equally important.
"Humanoid robots are the ultimate form of general-purpose robots, which will eventually develop in the direction of 'human-like', and there will be various types of general-purpose robots in the process." Ji Chao said that in the short term, humanoid robots will be guided by practical application scenarios, and various industries will launch different models of robot products for different tasks; In the long run, the future humanoid robots will be fully polished in all walks of life, and the upstream and downstream industry chain and task data accumulation will become increasingly perfect. With the advent of the "singularity" of general AI and the continuous reduction of the cost of robot hardware, humanoid robots are expected to enter thousands of households.