Application Scenarios Diversified Mechanical Arm Has Become One of the Hot Races

In fact, in recent years, the mechanical arm has appeared more and more frequently in social life and the public's eyes, such as making coffee, picking fruit, automatically collecting mouth and nose swabs for nucleic acid detection, and used for education and teaching... These devices have different appearances, many brands, and dazzling, while the price is from thousands to tens of thousands or even millions of yuan, with a wide gap.
What kind of "business philosophy" is contained in the seemingly simple mechanical arm? Why is the price gap of mechanical arm so large? Is its technical threshold high or low? What is the market prospect of the robotic arm that manufacturers rush to "dig gold"? In response to these issues of concern in the industry, the reporter of China Business News recently interviewed upstream and downstream enterprises of the mechanical arm industry chain and third-party experts.
Benefiting from intelligent manufacturing, industrial robots welcome growth
As the name implies, the mechanical arm is a mechanized, multi joint arm. It is a common but not unique form of a large class of robots such as "industrial robots". It can complete welding, transportation, packaging, inspection, gluing, polishing and polishing and other production links. Although the two terms are often used together in social production and life, industrial robots are more widely used in automobile, energy, food, new retail, 3C electronics, precision manufacturing, medical equipment, education and other industries.
According to the China Robot Industry Development Report (2021) (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") issued by the China Electronics Society, the robot market is generally divided into three categories: industrial robots, service robots and special robots. The Report predicts that the global robot market will reach 33.58 billion dollars in 2021. Among them, industrial robots were $14.49 billion, service robots and special robots were $12.52 billion and $6.57 billion respectively. It is not difficult to calculate that the share of industrial robots in the overall robot market is about 43%.
Qiang Qiang, Deputy General Manager of Hagong Intelligence (000584. SZ) and Chairman and General Manager of Hagong Modern Robotics, told the reporter that the application of mechanical arm has penetrated into more and more industry fields and business scenarios, and the background is naturally the wave of digital economy and the accelerated upgrading of manufacturing industry intelligence.
"China is in the stage of transformation and upgrading from a large manufacturing country to a strong manufacturing country. The demographic dividend is gradually weakening, the labor supply gap is growing, but the cost of employment continues to rise, which forces enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency with all their strength. Therefore, it provides favorable development opportunities for many industrial robot manufacturers, including Harbin Industrial Intelligence. In the past decade, there have been more and more participants in the field of industrial robots, and many listed enterprises have emerged The heat of the track can be seen. " Gao Qiang said so.
Wang Chikun, an independent economist and financial commentator, pointed out that the advantages of mechanical arm in replacing manual work lie in one-time investment, multi-year benefits, low supporting costs, and support × It can work continuously for 24 hours, and is basically not limited by time, space and other environments. At the same time, it can improve the yield of products through standardization.
In Wang Chikun's view, there is a strong demand for industrial upgrading and artificial substitution in China, and the domestic market base is huge, especially the manufacturing industry has a huge volume, rich demand and application scenarios, and the overall scale is far larger than that of other countries in the world. With the development of new manufacturing processes and new technologies such as various new materials, artificial intelligence, 5G communication, the robot arm will develop towards a more intelligent, more complex, and more efficient artificial robot arm.
According to the data provided by the business inquiry company Enterprise Inquiry, the number of relevant patent applications in China has increased year by year, from 1955 in 2016 to 11387 in 2020, based on the keyword "mechanical arm". As of October 13 this year, the number of patent applications related to mechanical arm nationwide has reached 10908.
At the 2021 World Robotics Conference, which was recently concluded, Xin Guobin, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that China's robot industry broke through 100 billion yuan for the first time last year. China has become the backbone supporting the development of the world's robot industry. China's industrial robot market has ranked first in the world for eight consecutive years, and its installed capacity will account for 44% of the global total in 2020.
The track is finely divided, and cooperative robots emerge as a new force
Industrial robots can be further divided into different tracks according to different dimensions such as degrees of freedom (number of axles), application industry, load weight, man-machine cooperation, etc., and the overall development is becoming more and more vertical. The outstanding performance is the emergence of cooperative robots. The so-called cooperative robot is still a mechanical arm in the mainstream form, but the difference between it and the traditional industrial robot is man-machine cooperation, that is, robots and people can work together in the same environment, which means that the safety of robots and the surrounding environment should be guaranteed.
Chang Li, vice president of card saving robot market, who was founded in 2014, told reporters that the emergence of a large number of cooperative robots was driven by market demand. During the development of the whole manufacturing industry, the demand for flexible production has exploded, and the collaborative robot just meets the market demand for lightweight, multi variety and customization. To put it simply, the collaborative robot covers a small area, is simple to program, and is easy to transport and install, enabling the manufacturing industry to respond flexibly and quickly to market changes.
Chang Li takes 3C electronics industry as an example. The industry has a large variety of products, small size, fast update cycle, high difficulty in automatic assembly, and large labor demand. In this case, cooperative robots can enable customers in the industry to deploy quickly to meet the requirements of high product accuracy and flexible production. At the same time, they can reduce the labor expenditure by replacing labor. The reporter learned that the products of the card saving robot focus on the application scenario where the load weight is less than 20kg. According to different load forces, different models of equipment such as 3kg, 5kg, 7kg, 12kg and 18kg are provided.
The Report also pointed out that collaborative industrial robots have become an important innovation direction of industrial robots. In the complex discrete scenes, people need robots to replace manual to complete more accurate and tedious repetitive work. Safe human-computer cooperation has become an inevitable trend. Traditional industrial robots need to work in an isolated environment, and relevant personnel cannot flexibly control the robot. In the face of unexpected situations outside the program, they cannot directly and effectively intervene manually, which greatly limits the application effect and application scenarios of industrial robots. With the wide popularization of Internet of Things technology, the productivity and reliability of robots have been greatly improved, which has led to the emergence of cooperative robots that are more suitable for special manufacturing application scenarios.
Intelligentization is still in its early stage, with broad prospects in the future
The robot arm industry is divided into three parts, including upstream parts, midstream ontology manufacturing, and downstream systematic integration. Wang Yuquan, the founding partner of Haiyin Capital, cited Guojin Securities Research Report, pointing out that from the gross margin level, the upstream core components and the downstream systematic integration link are all in the range of 30%~40%, while the gross margin of the midstream link is about 10%~20%. From the perspective of competitive advantages, domestic manufacturers have certain weaknesses in the core parts link, and their advantages are mainly reflected in the automation integration link. In his opinion, the key technology of the manipulator is the servo motor as the motion driver of each joint. If the cost is to be estimated, the cost of the manipulator body can generally use the "driver" × Quantity+reducer+controller+other components ". The real frontier of the robot arm industry is the deep integration with artificial intelligence. The intelligent robot arm is the general trend, but the robot arm is still in the early stage of intelligent.
As we all know, there are "four families" in the field of industrial robots, which refers to the four dominant brands of industrial robots, namely Kuka in Germany, ABB in Switzerland, Yaskawa and Fanuc in Japan. These four industrial robot giants have a long history and have long dominated the industrial robot market, and most of them have entered the Chinese market since the 1980s and 1990s. The domestic manufacturers are striving to catch up with each other and strive to "overtake at the curve" by virtue of market advantages, domestic and foreign investment, mergers and acquisitions and other capital operations.
The relevant person in charge of the card saving robot told the reporter that in the field of industrial robots, domestic enterprises are constantly accelerating the pace of autonomy, especially in the subdivision of the racetrack of cooperative robots. In fact, the domestic manufacturers and European and American enterprises can be said to be in synchronization. The core components of many cooperative robot devices have been basically localized. At the same time, cooperative robots are still making breakthroughs in precision, algorithm and other aspects.
Lu Zhangyuan, director of the Institute of Robot Industry of Gaogong, also said in an interview that although the birth of cooperative robots is not long, it is undoubtedly one of the current hot tracks. From the perspective of development, cooperative robots can meet the application requirements of multiple industrial and service scenarios. In the long run, they have broad development prospects. In this field, the technology gap between domestic and foreign manufacturers is gradually narrowing. In the Chinese market, the share of domestic manufacturers is about 70%. At present, it is in a rapid development stage. The evolution and direction of technology are generally recognized as adaptive control technology and the improvement of intelligence.