Robots "not doing their jobs properly" at the CIIF

The 19th China International Industry Fair (Insist on the Industry Fair) also came to a successful conclusion during the Double 11 "Hand-Chopping Festival" a few days ago. The current CIIF has eight professional exhibition areas as before. CNC machine tools and metal processing, industrial automation, robotics, new energy and electric power, information and communication technology applications, energy-saving and environmental protection technologies and equipment, energy-saving and new energy vehicles, and technological innovation. The robot exhibition area has become one of the most popular exhibition areas.

In our minds, the understanding of industrial robots is undoubtedly that robots similar to six-axis manipulators repeat the same boring actions on the assembly line of the factory. According to the observation of the Commissioner Elt, the robot exhibition area of the current industry fair The reason for the popularity is that the industrial machines in the exhibition area are "not doing their jobs properly". And from this kind of "do not do business properly", what kind of development focus and future development trend can we see?

The rise of 3C industry robots

At this CIIF, Swiss ABB, Yaskawa, Kawasaki and other well-known robot merchants all announced their new products. Among them, micro-robots became one of the focal points of the CIIF. ABB announced the IRB1100, a new small robot in the 3C industry that has not yet been officially released, directly indicating that it will enter the Chinese 3C industry market. Not only that, ABB also exhibited the YUMI dual-arm robot that was launched last year. Although it is the same robot, this time YUMI not only showed us grasping objects and writing brush characters, but also showed more complex somatosensory control. ability. Simply put, it is based on the movement of the human hand to imitate the homework. Its purpose is to meet the production needs of small parts assembly, especially for flexible production and flexible manufacturing in the 3C industry.

Not only that, but Yaskawa also announced a new micro-robot at this year's CIIF, claiming to be a small industrial robot in the world. This MOTOMINI robot is 36 cm high, weighs only 4.3 kg, and can carry parts of about 0.5 kg. In addition to its miniaturization, the advantages of high speed and high precision are undoubtedly prepared for the 3C industry.

The concept of "small" is not only one of the focuses of this CIIF, but also one of the development trends of industrial automation equipment and spare parts today. As the integration of the three major technologies of computers, communications and consumer electronics, the 3C industry requires a huge amount of high-precision operations for the equipment and integration of chips. In addition, the domestic 3C industry has expanded to a state of near saturation. For chips, etc. The demand for small parts is huge, and the speed of manual assembly has not kept up with the demand, which makes the 3C industry robots have to accelerate the development. Although from the current point of view, most of the domestic industrial robot market is occupied by industrial robots for automobile manufacturing, according to the data collection and analysis of Ai Erte market personnel, it is found that industrial robots in the 3C industry rely on high annual sales volume. The growth rate will inevitably make the 3C industry robot market larger and larger, and it will not even be smaller than the market for automobile manufacturing robots.

Vision system technology is becoming more mature

At this CIIF, the focus is undoubtedly that industrial robots are doing things that are not related to their own jobs, such as playing golf, painting, playing piano, and even playing table tennis with athletes. Although on the surface, this seems to be a publicity method for companies to promote their own robot advantages. But the common ground behind also illustrates the future direction of industrial robots: anthropomorphism.

The so-called anthropomorphization is to allow robots to perform tasks autonomously after identifying, cognizing, and judging steps in a specific environment. Just like human beings can see, hear the surrounding environment and act according to the instructions of the brain. And the basic link of all these is the recognition technology of the robot.

Today’s rapidly developing recognition technology is undoubtedly the robot’s vision system. Like ABB’s golf robot and Siasun’s table tennis robot, although the robot’s "brain" has been programmed with complex algorithms in advance, the robot must be able to adopt the correct For the action, high-frequency information collection is necessary. In addition, the trajectory of the ball will be different every time when playing table tennis, and the situation will be different every time in industrial production. In order to adapt to this flexible situation, the robot's vision must be accurate. For example, Siasun’s table tennis robot has a vision collector above it. According to relevant personnel, this vision system can collect 180 pictures per second so that it can analyze the specific path of the table tennis, even in this case. , The result of the game eventually ended with the robot losing a goal.

In addition, the YUMI robot just mentioned can recognize human hands to perform actions, and the face recognition robot of ABB can describe the different characteristics of each human face. The visual system in the recognition system has been obtained to a certain extent. After achieving a breakthrough, I believe that the tactile and olfactory systems of robots will also become the core of the development, which also proves that intelligent robots are the real development trend of industrial robots.

Although many new postures of industrial robots were seen at this year's CIIF, it is a pity that the domestic progress in robotics is still relatively slow, and it is basically still in its infancy. Chinese robotics companies started relatively late in general, and are now mainly concentrated in the low-end and mid-range sectors, and their core parts and components basically rely on imports. In the high-end field, there is almost nothing. As for whether the robotics industry in the future will be the core of development as predicted by many reports, it cannot be asserted. In the future, wait and see.