Electronic Enthusiast Network reports (text/Li Ningyuan) The rapid development of the robot industry has spawned various types of robots, which are subtly changing our daily life and production methods. In order to speed up the application and expansion of various robots, the concept of "robot+"came into being.
On January 18th this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other 17 departments issued the "Implementation Plan for Robot+Application Action", which pointed out that by 2025, the density of robots in manufacturing industry will double compared with that in 2020, and the application depth and breadth of service robots and special robots have been significantly improved, supporting some emerging fields to explore and develop robot applications.
Constantly released robot market potential
According to the data given by IFR and the Chinese Institute of Electronics, we can see that the domestic robot market has been in a steady growth trend, from $7.7 billion in 2018 to $17.4 billion in 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 20%. According to the forecast of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the domestic robot market is expected to reach the market scale of $25.1 billion in 2024. The rapid growth of the whole industry provides sufficient market space for the continuous and in-depth application of various robots.
In terms of subdivision types, industrial robots are undoubtedly the most widely used and covered robots at present. According to the data of IFR and Chinese Institute of Electronics, the global industrial robots began to return to strong growth in 2021 and 2022 after the market scale declined in 2019 and 2020. In 2022, the global industrial robot market was close to 20 billion US dollars. China’s industrial robots have maintained a steady growth rate. In 2021, the market size of China’s industrial robots is about 7.5 billion US dollars, accounting for 43% of the world. It is estimated that the market size of China’s industrial robots is expected to reach 11.5 billion US dollars in 2024.
Service robots rely on the popularity of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things and other technologies, and the downstream functional scenarios are constantly expanding. According to the data of Chinese Institute of Electronics, the global service robot market will grow from 13.8 billion dollars in 2020 to 21.7 billion dollars in 2022, and it is expected to reach 29 billion dollars in 2024. From the domestic market, the market growth rate of service robots is faster, with a compound annual growth rate close to 30%. In 2022, the market size of domestic service robots is close to 7 billion US dollars, and it is expected to exceed 10 billion US dollars by 2024.
In recent years, we can always hear some new progress of rehabilitation robots and medical robots in the market, which really reflects that special robots have begun to be applied in a deeper level under the stimulation of emerging needs such as medical needs, agricultural needs and nursing rehabilitation needs. According to the forecast of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the market size of China’s special robots is expected to exceed 3.4 billion US dollars in 2024, and the domestic growth rate in the same period is also above the global market growth rate.
Intelligence in the development field of "robot+"
The "Robot+"Application Action Implementation Plan "delineates a total of 10 economic fields and social and people’s livelihood fields for the in-depth application and development of robots. The fields of economic development are manufacturing, agriculture, construction, energy and trade logistics, and the fields of social livelihood are medical health, aged care services, education, business community services and safety emergency applications.
In the action implementation plan, one word has been mentioned many times, that is, "intelligence", and key words such as intelligent transformation, intelligent transformation and intelligent system construction have been mentioned many times. Intelligence is undoubtedly the most important link in the development of all kinds of robots around the concept of "robot+"in the future.
The intelligence of robots is closely related to AI chips. The rapid development of intelligent robot applications and algorithms, such as deep learning, convolutional neural network, image recognition, voice recognition and intelligent perception, put forward 2-3 orders of magnitude performance optimization requirements for AI chips. Thanks to the rapid development of new materials, processes and devices, such as 3D stacked memory and process evolution, it also provides the AI chips with the feasibility of significantly improving performance and reducing power consumption.
In the future, robots can foresee that there will be a large number of data computing and intelligent interaction needs, and the chip itself needs to have high throughput, programmability, expansibility and high memory and bandwidth. With the increasing demand for AI processing and intelligent interaction, SoC has become an inevitable trend of development. Technavio, a market research organization, also shows that the SoC market will be mainly driven by robots and 5G fields in the next few years.
AI chips are embedded in the robot system in the form of SoC, which can not only optimize the local performance of applications such as video processing and intelligent sensing interaction, but also make it easier to systematically optimize the overall architecture of the robot.
Write it at the end
The "Robot+"Application Action Implementation Plan also mentioned that it is necessary to build a number of benchmark enterprises for robots+applications in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain to support the development of the robot industry in all directions. With the blessing of national policies, domestic robot applications are being developed into in-depth and diversified applications, and the robot market that constantly releases potential will also drive the upstream and downstream of the domestic robot industry chain into a new stage of development.