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

June 9. home appliance giant U.S. officially released a new brand of home service robots - WISHUG, and officially announced that the first product is a small but “family” service robots, plans to go on sale in the second half of this year, the future will be set up to operate independently of the entity.

Science and Technology Board Daily reporter noted that, in addition to traditional home appliance enterprises, emerging startups have also entered the game. According to incomplete statistics, in 2021. 113 financing events related to the service robot track, with a financing amount of more than 44 billion yuan.

Behind the frantic influx of enterprises into the robotics industry is aimed at potential market opportunities. According to data from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, China's service robot market size was 30.26 billion yuan in 2021. and is expected to exceed 60 billion yuan in 2023 .

“Just as the emergence of smartphones opened the era of the mobile Internet, and electric cars led the way to bring in the new energy era, family service robots will open a new era in the future. In the not-too-distant future, every home owns one of these service robots.” Tang Jian, Chief AI Officer and General Manager of AI Innovation Center of Midea Group, said to the reporter of Sci-Tech Board Daily.

Service robot blue ocean shipping channel has emerged

“In the not-too-distant future, every home will have its own robot.” This is the vision put forward by Bill Gates as early as 2007 in the Global Science magazine. And Tesla founder Musk also pointed out at the 2022 TED conference that by 2050. all homes will have universal humanoid robots, meaning that every home will have a robot nanny.

CICC pointed out in its research report that the service robot market, after the emergence of entry-level products such as sweeping robots, the industrial chain has been basically formed, and it has gradually entered the stage of intelligence, diversification and popularization, and it is the next intelligent terminal in the era of the Internet of everything.

In Tang Jian's view, service robots do have the potential to open a new era and become a new generation of explosive consumer products following PCs and smartphones.

Tang Jian, Chief AI Officer and General Manager of AI Innovation Center of Midea Group

At present, home service robots can be broadly categorized into vertical scene-oriented home appliance robots, children's companion education robots, and human-machine interactive integrated service robots. Most of the mature products on the market are in the first two categories, such as sweeping robots, glass cleaning robots, and has given birth to a number of listed companies such as Stone Technology and Corvus.

Comprehensive home service robots, because of its high standards in hardware and software and the complexity of the algorithm technology, only a few players such as Amazon, Samsung and other players to enter the game.

Tang Jian believes that although the comprehensive class of home service robots is still in the early stages of development, it is a blue ocean market worth exploring.

“Home service robots are the entrance to whole-house intelligence and the carrier of home central control. Our prediction is that in the near future, every home will have such a service robot, acting as a housekeeper and assistant, and it can be said that the market outlook is very broad.”

Who is the central brain of whole-house intelligence?

The small but family service robot launched by the United States will cover four major functional segments: AI housekeeper, family assistant, security guard, and technology playmate.

Through LIDAR fusion 3D camera, Xiaoyi robot will autonomously explore and build a 3D map of the home, record and automatically update the location of furniture and rooms. When the owner sends a command, the robot can move to the corresponding place according to the command, and complete the delivery of goods, messages and other operations.

When the owner is not at home, Xiaowei will autonomously recognize whether the refrigerator door, TV, and windows are closed, listen to smoke sensors in real time, and so on, and push the alarm when it finds abnormalities.

“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.

Tang Jian said that this is due to compared to industrial robots, household robots are faced with a more complex scene, which means that AI algorithms and models need to have a more powerful generalization and robustness, in order to quickly adapt to different application scenarios.

“To take a counterintuitive example, which action is more difficult, going to the refrigerator to get bread or assembling a car? For a human, the former is a very simple task, but for a robot, it is more difficult than assembling a car.”

Tang Jian further explains, “Although the steps of assembling a car are complex and may require hundreds or even thousands of steps, the operation process and objects are very single and fixed. On the other hand, home service robots face thousands of households, each with very different refrigerators and drawer doors. At present, there is basically no robot that can smoothly complete the action of fetching bread from the refrigerator.”

Can it become a breakthrough in AI industrialization?

Another major difficulty for household robots lies in human-robot interaction. “There are also challenges in how robots can communicate with people in a smooth and free manner, which involves voice interaction, as well as the understanding of natural language.” Tang Jian said.

Overall, the bottleneck faced by service robots for large-scale application is the general challenge of AI landing at the moment.

“If a family service robot, which can move very autonomously in the home, complete all kinds of household chores through mechanical arms and dexterous hands, and have a comfortable conversation with the user, it means that it has realized the leap from weak AI to strong AI. This is the direction that AI academia and industry are currently working on.”

Although the challenge is not small, Tang Jian believes that from the perspective of scale landing, products such as home service robots are expected to become the first breakthrough in the industrialization of AI.

“Simply using AI algorithms for commercialization is less sustainable, and the commercial value it brings is not enough to support the cost of human input. In my opinion, the right way to land AI should be a combination punch, i.e., software, hardware, and a cloud platform, to form a complete set of products or solutions, like products like home service robots, so as to create greater user value and commercial value, in order to achieve sustainable and high-speed development.”