On June 30th, professor Wang Tianmiao from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics was invited to participate in the robotics industry sub forum and gave a wonderful report on the core technology and development trends of service robots.

As an ultra long cycle track, such as mobile internet and smartphones (2005-2020), new energy vehicles and smart cars (2015-2030), digital economy and smart robots (2020-2050), etc., it has always been highly concerned by governments, industries, academia, investment communities, and other countries, especially for China. As market dividends and population dividends gradually weaken, The technological dividend has become a core element for the resurgence of China's economy and the sustainable and high-speed development of its comprehensive national strength. Among them, artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, high-end manufacturing of new materials, carbon neutrality of new energy, biotechnology, and other technologies have become important driving forces for future new industry transformation and new economic development.

Social development and cutting-edge interdisciplinary innovation are constantly stimulating the evolution and development of intelligent robots from technology to form

Industrial scale development and urban agglomeration demand: on the one hand, efficiency and quality drive, labor force decline and cost increase drive, promoting the development from the secondary industry to the tertiary industry and the application of the primary industry. At the same time, the Belt and Road has become an important profit channel for robots and automated production line enterprises in China. On the other hand, the gathering of population and logistics in large cities, including food and agricultural products, prefabricated vegetables and fresh food, garbage and sewage treatment and environmental protection, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation, intelligent energy management and energy storage and exchange, AIot and safety monitoring, disaster-relief robots, as well as robots for consultation, logistics, cleaning, hotels, exhibitions, coffee, etc., have all become urgently needed service and product robots.

The acceleration of aging society and the demand for new generation entertainment, cultural and creative sports:

On the one hand, the demand for robots such as chatting, accompanying, assistant, elderly care, rehabilitation, and traditional Chinese medicine is becoming increasingly urgent, including digital chronic disease medical and AI virtual robots, fitness and rehabilitation and traditional Chinese medicine massage robots, accessible mobile robots, rolling massage and fecal disposal robots, among which 15% are over 65 years old and 25% are over 75 years old 45% of people aged 85 and above require this service. On the other hand, robots for young people in areas such as technology, cultural and creative industries, entertainment, and sports, including virtual human agency and communication, human-machine hybrid intelligent robots, emotional companion robots, cooking robots, cleaning robots, VR personalized fitness robots, stem cell and beauty injection robots, entertainment and dance robots, etc.

Irreplaceable robots in special scenarios: on the one hand, there is a demand for advanced technologies such as interstellar exploration, precise treatment operations, and biological tissues, including space exploration and immigration, brain interfaces and consciousness, surgical robots and vascular nanorobots, electromyographic life tissue organs, healthy and joyful biochemical technology, and eternal life and soul. On the other hand, hazardous operations and local war demand stimulation, including research and development of hazardous operations, rescue and disaster relief, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned tanks, unmanned ships, intelligent weapon systems, robot soldiers, etc.

Dynamic 1: Frontier hot topics in basic research, especially new materials and rigid-flexible coupled soft robots, NLP and multimodality, brain computer interfaces and cognition, basic software and platforms, etc., are particularly crucial, as breakthroughs in basic originality are expected to change the form, product functions, and service modes of robots.

1. Humanoid robot technology, lifelike organisms, artificial muscles, artificial skin, electromyographic control, tissue organs, soft robots, etc;

2. DNA nanorobots and new material micro/nano components, nanomaterials, MEMS, 3D printing, intelligent prostheses, micro/nano manufacturing assembly, driving energy conversion, force feedback interaction, etc;

3. Biological perception technology, audiovisual force touch sensors, edge AI computing, rigid flexible coupling, perception driven integration, etc;

4. Natural language understanding, emotion recognition and human-computer interaction technology, conversational intelligent interaction technology, emotional interaction, remote chat, and child and elderly care;

5. Brain computer interface and mechatronics integration technology, brain science, neural consciousness, electromyographic signals, knowledge graph, cognitive recognition, machine reasoning, etc;

6. Metaverse virtual human and robot integration technology, next-generation internet, entertainment interaction, agents, situational awareness, remote operation, etc;

7. The composite robot technology integrates hands, feet, eyes, and brain, consisting of a mobile platform, robotic arm, visual module, end effector, etc. It integrates environmental perception, positioning and navigation, intelligent control, unstructured environmental recognition, multi machine collaboration, intelligent transportation, etc;

8. Super software automation, robot operating systems, soft robots, RPA, property management, finance, government automation, etc;

9. Cloud service robot technology, distributed cloud services, cloud processing centers, artificial intelligence and machine learning, interpretable artificial intelligence, remote rental services, remote teaching services, robot as a service RaaS, etc;

10. Ethics, Robotics for Good, Employment, Privacy, Ethics and Law, etc.

Dynamic 2: Robots+, with sensors and core components, high-frequency standardized commercial applications (such as indoor and outdoor logistics, cleaning, emotional care assistants, etc.), and Raas and App software being particularly critical, as these are expected to break through the single product limit of over ten million units or form a subscription based business model

High value-added core components include AI vision, force and touch, RV, motor, AMR, design and application software, etc; Super software automation tools such as AIops, RPA, Raas, and other vertical large models, including cloud service platforms such as Raas for leasing, training, processing, and application development; Medical robots; Mobile composite robots for loading and unloading, handling logistics, or cleaning; For entertainment, catering, massage, moxibustion, accompanying and other service robots; For unmanned systems in agriculture, construction, recycling, dismantling, energy, nuclear industry, etc.

In terms of robotics and commercial applications, some companies in China are also emerging in the field of complete robot systems and core components. They are expected to have broad application prospects in new energy, automated logistics, agricultural and consumer products, biotechnology, public services, household services, and other fields, showing explosive development in segmented fields.

The "14th Five Year Plan for the Development of the Robot Industry" mentions that the annual growth rate of operating revenue in the robot industry during the 14th Five Year Plan period exceeds 20%, and the density of manufacturing robots has doubled. The application scenarios cover multiple dimensions such as to G end, to B end, and to C end. Environmental standards, high-frequency space, and labor costs also make "machine replacement" a pain point in some scenarios.

Dynamic 3: Big model+robot, which is expected to integrate the general big model with the vertical big model of specific robot applications in the application scenarios of embodied intelligence interactivity, knowledge, and standardization, greatly improving the level of robot intelligence and deepening its widespread application

As is well known, universal multimodal, NLP, CV, interactive and other AI models are innovating robot perception methods, environmental cognitive complexity, knowledge-based fusion decision-making and control, and are expected to significantly improve the level of robot intelligence and wide application fields, especially in the integration of interactive, knowledge-based, and standardized application scenarios of embodied intelligence, Including science and education, assistants, caregivers, elderly care, as well as guiding operations, cleaning, logistics, etc., it is expected to make breakthroughs first.

Dynamic 4: Humanoid (biomimetic) robots are expected to form a unified form of single robot products, which is expected to lead to the rapid development of AI chips, various sensors, and supply chain reconstruction and scaling of robot components.

The arrival of the era of "robot+" embraces the billions of biomimetic robots. With the intensification of population aging and the flourishing development of intelligent manufacturing, at the same time, robots, artificial intelligence, and cloud services big data are entering a disruptive development stage. Bionic robots are driving the large-scale industrialization development of intelligent robots with another modular, intelligent, and cloud service development path. Among them, humanoid and quadruped robots will be the two most promising sub tracks among biomimetic robots. According to optimistic estimates, if 3-5% of the global labor gap is likely to be replaced by biomimetic humanoid robots between 2030 and 2035, it is expected that the demand for humanoid robots will be about 1-3 million units, corresponding to a global market size exceeding 260 billion yuan and a Chinese market exceeding 65 billion yuan.

Biomimetic robots still prioritize the key technical difficulties of flexible motion stability and dexterous operation operability. Unlike traditional robots, in order to flexibly move and operate in unstructured environments, biomimetic and humanoid robots have a more urgent demand for system stability and high-end core components. The key technical difficulties include high torque density drive units, intelligent motion control, real-time environmental perception ability, human-machine interaction, and other technologies. The academic community is actively exploring new intelligent materials, rigid flexible coupling artificial muscles Artificial perception of skin, soft robots, etc.

ChatGPT+Biomimetic Robot "enables robots to transition from" resemblance in form "to" resemblance in spirit ". Open AI invested in 1X Technologies humanoid robot company to officially enter the robotics industry, exploring the application and landing of ChatGPT in the field of robotics, exploring multimodal large language models, and promoting the self iterative learning cognitive model of humanoid robots in the combination of human-machine interaction text knowledge and work environment application process knowledge, To solve the serious lag challenge problem of the combination of the basic end framework algorithm of the robot industry software and the perception front-end AI edge computing.

Although humanoid robots have fatal weaknesses in terms of efficiency and energy, application and convenience, as well as maintenance and price, it is necessary to pay attention to the unexpected progress of Tesla's rapid iteration of humanoid robots. The reason is that Tesla has redefined and designed humanoid robots from its own specific application scenarios in large-scale automobile manufacturing in Germany, China, Mexico, and other areas, especially in terms of mechanical structure Electronic drive, new design of 40 joint components, and even some of them are disruptive, including different output torque, output speed, positioning accuracy, rotational stiffness, force perception, self-locking, volume size, etc. These original innovative breakthroughs are expected to drive the development of humanoid robots in the "perception ability, interaction ability, operation and control ability" universal computing model and application professional vertical large model, and give birth to their robot AI chips The rapid development of various sensors and robot parts supply chain restructuring and scaling has made it possible to gradually reduce costs from Tesla Robotics, which is now over $1 million, and approach the sales price of $20000.

Finally, looking at the development of history and social forms, analyzing the future trend of interdisciplinary and disruptive technological innovation in new materials, new energy, biology, AI, and other fields. Focusing on the creation of new market demands for the world's aging, urbanization, population changes, and networking, intelligence, and scale, there is still uncertainty that global service robots will break through trillions of market development space in the next 10 years, There are three major debates that stand out: one is the path of morphological evolution? Industrial, commercial, humanoid, large model, or divergent applications; Secondly, sustainable driving of commercial value? Operations, training, integration, complete machines, components, platforms, etc., authorization of IP, sales, leasing, services, subscriptions, etc., and collaborative policies related to universities, private enterprises, state-owned enterprises, innovation, supply chain, capital, government, etc; Thirdly, robot ethics?