"Robot is a highly integrated technology with super high complexity. It is the ultimate expression of AI hardware. It not only depends on AI algorithms, such as machine vision, voice interaction, chip and other information technology, but also has high requirements for hardware. " Fu Sheng, chairman and CEO of cheetah mobile, said at the "robot night" press conference.
As Fu Sheng said, the development of consumer robots can be seen only by looking at hardware. For example, in the market, although the service robot products have been launched for two or three years, so far, the mainstream products are still "barreled" robots everywhere. Here, the bucket design not only reduces the flexibility of the robot, but also reduces the fun of the user experience, which is one of the reasons why consumers don't buy it.
At the software design level, most of the existing service robots use the way of uploading to the cloud, and there is no clear technical specification to protect the user's privacy“ At home, if there is always such a robot looking at you, it will be very uncomfortable. I feel that there is no privacy. " A user said in an interview.
"Moreover, if you spend 5000 or 6000 yuan to buy such a robot, it's not worth it. If it's a toy, it's too expensive; As the housekeeper of the family, it can't bear such responsibility. Taking care of the children as an example, it's a very complicated matter. I don't dare to give the children to it. It can't make it. "
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How to survive before the arrival of robots?
"When will the real tuyere come? unclear. However, the development stage of service robot industry is roughly the period before the birth of iPhone 1, so it will take time. We all agree that 2023 will be a turning point. " Mr. Chen said.
In the history of many emerging industries, only when the start-ups enter before the tuyere, can they get the last share, and the service robot market is no exception. At this early stage of development, on the one hand, the product form has not been finalized; on the other hand, the technology development is not enough to support the existing so-called "rigid demand"; there are also the following problems, such as unable to achieve mass production, users do not pay the bill and so on. For the service robot human technology companies, this is a dilemma.
"Looking at the existing service robot products on the market, I'm afraid only the technology of intelligent speaker can support the function of this product." In an interview, a person in the industry pointed out.
Now how can robot manufacturers sell their products so as to have a certain hematopoietic capacity?
·Grasp the details
"First of all, we need to work hard on specific functions and details, such as the robot face lines you can see. Although they look very simple, it took us half a year to make this change, repeatedly debugging and modifying. For consumers, they won't know how much effort you have spent, they will think your robot looks more lovely. " Mr. Chen said.
In fact, not only Mr. Chen's company began to work hard on some details of robots, but also many start-ups who are interested in making a contribution to the service robot market have begun to dig deep and optimize the details of robots.
"In order to enable you working in the company to pay attention to the situation at home remotely and issue accurate instructions to the robot in time, we integrate three technologies of speech recognition, speech text conversion and semantic understanding to improve the accuracy of the robot's execution of instructions. In this case, even if the sentence you say is a new sentence for the robot, it will combine the keywords and semantics in the sentence to execute and give timely feedback. " Another domestic service robot start-up CEO also said in an interview.
To some extent, covos's sweeping robot is to seize a just need of people, and strive to make great efforts in details to make the user experience better, so as to open up the market. Of course, the existing home service robots are much more complex than functional robots, but the way to enter the market actually has the same effect.
·Solve the problem of mass production
Even if we can find a way to open up the market, for many domestic robot manufacturers, mass production is even more urgent.
"As an agent, when I communicate with many domestic robot manufacturers, the most common question I ask is" when is the fastest time for your robot to be mass produced? " Almost no one can give me a guarantee of mass production in a short period of time. " The head of a domestic robot agent pointed out.
Regarding this issue, the robot company, which has gained a good market share in the world, explained to us in an interview:
"On the one hand, we are able to mass produce robots. On the other hand, we have many hardware and manufacturing partners in different parts of the robot production process, which together make robots into assembly line products. Secondly, the cost of our products is less than half of the current market pricing, and the precise control of the cost is also our competitiveness. "
Obviously, many factors, such as immature market, cost and standard, lead to the "dystocia" of many manufacturers.
Stepping into the first step of science fiction world, the aging population opens the trillions market of service robots
From the market level, many robot manufacturers agree that the b-end market is now the lifebuoy.
"Now it seems that the b-end market will be better, so our main business is still focused on enterprise users, providing customized business service robots for specific application scenarios, such as schools, courts, restaurants and so on." Mr. Chen said.
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In general, there is a rigid demand and market for service robots. Therefore, it is the most important thing for domestic robot manufacturers to be patient, seize the demand, concentrate on building a good product, and solve the problems of mass production and cost.


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