Midea's high-profile entry into the service robotics track with the launch of its new brand “WISHUG”

“Xiaowei robot also has a built-in projector, which can autonomously move to the appropriate machine position and start projecting. When you're not at home, sometimes you wonder if you forgot to turn off the stove, and then you can also remotely control it through your cell phone to check in the kitchen.”

The deeper positioning of Xiaowei robot is to become the central system to control and link all home appliances and IoT devices, and with hundreds of smart home scenes in the United States, to form ecological synergy.

Zhang Peng (a pseudonym), a senior person in the field of smart home, told the reporter that over the past few years, smart home products are still far from smart in terms of user experience.

“Can only say that the new means of connection, that is, connected to the Internet through the cell phone APP to control the device. The real intelligence is required to have the function of the brain in the home, can calculate on its own, and then control multiple objects in the family, multiple devices linkage.”

Zhang Peng portrayed to the reporter such a life: “At night when you get home, the living room lights automatically light up, curtains slowly closed, TV, air conditioning, water heater automatically open. Leaving home in the morning, a variety of electrical appliances are automatically turned off, but also the sweeping robot sent out to do the cleaning. This can be called a complete set of intelligent systems.”

To realize all this, who will play the smart home scene of the central brain, especially critical. But over the years, the industry has always lacked such pivotal intelligent hardware.

Zhang Peng pointed out that “from the level of the smart home, the current level of technology is able to achieve whole-house perception. However, the central brain is located in which part of the home appliances, there is still a debate. Smart speakers, smart center control screen, smart gateway ...... are all companies are exploring, but are not considered successful. I'm afraid it will take time to come up with an answer.”

And the United States obviously hope that the service robot to carry this role. Tang Jian told reporters that Xiaoyi robot has a preliminary function of family central control.

“As soon as the owner comes home, Xiaowei can automatically turn on the lights and play appropriate music. When the robot senses that the temperature and humidity are too high or the PM2.5 is not up to standard, it automatically turns on the air conditioner, air purifier, and turns on the humidifier. Our positioning for it is the carrier of home central control, as well as the entrance to the smart home.”

Mechanical arm and dexterous hand are not yet mature

Currently, the upstream of the service robot industry chain includes various parts and components providers, such as chips, cameras, projectors, LIDAR, controllers, sensors, etc., as well as machine vision, voice recognition and other system integration.

The middle reaches of the industry chain are the whole machine manufacturing of household service robots, medical service robots, and public service robots. The downstream application areas of the service robot industry chain involve catering, hospitality, healthcare, elderly care, housekeeping, firefighting, logistics, and so on.

Tang Jian, Chief AI Officer and General Manager of AI Innovation Center of Midea Group, told Sci-Tech Board Daily that the basic hardware and sensor industry chain of service robots has been relatively mature, and the difficulties are mainly in the manufacturing of mechanical arms and dexterous hands.

“The upstream of the industrial chain of family service robots like LiDAR, cameras, projectors, controllers, sensors, etc. are more mature, and what's more challenging is the mechanical arm and dexterous hand, which can't yet be made lightweight and low-cost. The focus of these related manufacturers is still on industrial robots, and the maturity of products applicable to home scenarios is relatively low.”

In addition, although a variety of service robots are springing up, but the whole industry is still on the edge of the scale of application. Some industry analysts believe that service robots are still subject to application scenarios “non-mandatory”, gimmick than substance. At the same time, at this stage, the advantages of robot cost reduction and efficiency is not obvious enough, the robot itself is far from intelligent.