Hand in hand for a win-win situation, a robot dancing on the "cloud".

In the past, people had the impression that restaurant waiters were young people running around and with quick legs, and some fast food brands, such as McDonald's and KFC, were popular choices for many college students to earn pocket money part-time during holidays.

However, if you pay close attention, you will find that a new phenomenon has emerged in the catering industry in recent years: employees who order food at the front desk, do chores in the back kitchen, and go out to deliver goods are facing a shortage.

The China Employment Training Technical Guidance Center once released a national recruitment greater than the "most lacking" of the 100 occupations, in the list, the top five occupational attributes are all service industries, of which "restaurant waiter" ranks fifth.

Faced with the problem of manpower shortage, many companies are looking at the field of science and technology - if robots are used to replace these repetitive mechanical labor, will it be possible to liberate people to do more creative work?

As early as 2015, Fu Sheng, chairman and CEO of Cheetah Mobile and chairman of Orion Star, saw the phenomenon of high labor costs in foreign service industries, and also felt the decline of the domestic demographic dividend. At the same time, the progress of artificial intelligence has made Fu Sheng realize that the boundaries of machines can be extended, and machines can evolve from factory-style automated operations to actively adapt to changing environments, and make decisions according to different environments, making robots move from industry to service. So Fu Sheng decided to invest in the robot company Orion Star and devoted himself to the research of service robots. In recent years, the development of cloud computing has further promoted the rapid maturity of the robotics industry, and the value of cloud infrastructure is critical for both robot deployment (including development, configuration, and installment) and operation (maintenance, analysis, and control).

So, the key question is, can our robot level be able to achieve a certain degree of liberation from repetitive labor?

According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2020, the population aged 60 and above in China has exceeded 260 million, accounting for 18.7% of the total population, of which more than 190 million are aged 65 and above, accounting for 13.5%. According to international standards, the proportion of the population over 60 years old exceeds 10% or the proportion of the population over 65 years old exceeds 7%, which means that the country is in an aging society, accounting for more than 14%, which means that it has entered a deep aging society.

Counting the high-frequency life scenarios around people, you will find that the current social demand for labor is still huge: such as health, catering, transportation, etc., but these industries have been seriously understaffed, because more people like industries with flexible working hours and higher salaries, even if it is labor-intensive, online car-hailing, food delivery and other industries have become the first choice for more people. As of 2018, Meituan has an average of nearly 600,000 daily active riders; The number of registered Ele.me riders has already exceeded 3 million, diverting a large number of service industry talents.

The service industry, which lacks people, is also more difficult to do, and wearing multiple hats is often the norm. Typical nurses in hospitals, in addition to taking care of patients, also need to do a lot of basic work such as monitoring, recording, and delivering meals, and the shortage of manpower and the high rate of repetitive work will inevitably lead to a decline in efficiency and service quality. For the catering industry, it is impossible to recruit people, and it will also have a chain impact on takeaway and other industries.

The scene of the service industry has some uniform work characteristics: high labor intensity, fixed scenes, high repetitive labor rate, long time, and high physical exertion. These characteristics can be solved almost naturally by service robots, and robots can be seen in many restaurants, hotels, and hospitals.

For example, in hot pot restaurants, food delivery can already be completed autonomously by robots, and employees can devote the time and energy saved to improving the service level of birthday celebrations for guests, shabu-shabu and other services.

Fu Sheng also said in an interview: With years of R&D and technology iteration, service robots are about to come to an explosive period, and there are three characteristics:

● The cost has been reduced, from a large tens of thousands of yuan, to now the Orion Star Robot is rented to restaurant owners, and the rent for one month can be very low

●Service robots are transforming from a relational market to a customer-based market or a product-based market. Nowadays, a large number of small and medium-sized businesses, a small restaurant, are willing to buy service robots, which shows that robots have really brought cost reduction and efficiency increase

● China's demographic dividend is declining, young people are also more inclined to non-labor-intensive industries, and the demand for artificial intelligence + service industry is more urgent

People's needs are constantly iterative, when people from satisfying food and clothing to begin to focus on enjoying life, some types of work in the past will no longer be sought after, this process is almost irreversible, even if the service industry in developed countries is more paid, there is still a shortage of people. Machines replace human labor, which seems to be the most straightforward solution at present. By introducing service robots, there are obvious benefits for the future: freeing people from repetitive manual tasks and making traditional business as efficient as the Internet. Such a vision is also the most urgent need of the service industry, where is it now? And how soon can it come?

The digitalization of the real economy is starting with service robots

Robots have begun to make their way into all corners of the global service industry.

According to Fu Sheng's speech at a conference, Orion Star's delivery robot in Malaysia can reach 200 times a day, which is already equivalent to 1-1.5 natural persons in real life from the perspective of delivery.

Orion Star's "Lucky Leopard" robot can realize functions such as catering delivery, cruising and running, member recruitment, and active customer solicitation, and can replace the repetitive labor of restaurant employees, while autonomous walking, precise navigation, intelligent obstacle avoidance, voice interaction, and multi-machine collaboration are functions that can be stably realized today, and can independently adapt to fixed scenarios such as restaurants, enterprises, hospitals, and hotels. "Leopard Mini" and other customized robots can accurately distinguish the user's voice and demands in a noisy environment.

Hand in hand for a win-win situation, a robot dancing on the "cloud".

　　When customers walk out of the restaurant and end the dining experience, the job of the Lucky Leopard does not end. At this time, Lucky Leopard has become the third identity of "operation think tank", providing restaurant operators with digital management functions.

What's more, the robot also plays a terminal role. Fu Sheng mentioned that in the digitization of the real economy, in fact, there have been a lot of explorations, such as online cashiering, checkout, ordering into APP ordering, etc., but in order to make the service industry truly become a digital world, a terminal device must be needed - just as the iPhone without buttons set off the era of smart phones, and the birth of Tesla promoted the development of new energy vehicles. And the service robot may be the terminal that sets off the industry change.

Service robots are only a small step in the digitalization of the real economy, and a larger vision and future is that physical store operators can manage commercial stores based on huge business data like managing Internet apps.

Behind these service capabilities is actually the combination of the most advanced technology at present. Until today, the service robot is still a very complex system integration product, it involves more than thousands of parts, involving artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, network, etc., the specific application of the robot requires a lot of infrastructure. In some public components and some areas with scale advantages and technology intensity as core advantages, robot companies need a strong partner ecosystem to support, and one of the important partners behind Orion Star is HUAWEI CLOUD.

Cloud cloud co-creation, with technological innovation, to drive industrial upgrading

A small robot shuttling in a restaurant and working hard can continue to learn, evolve, adapt to the environment, and realize its own evolutionary journey in artificial intelligence, which is inseparable from the development of another thing - cloud services.

If there is no cloud service, then the robot's voice interaction, navigation, action control and other algorithm operation and data storage services need to build a complex software and hardware system locally, which not only increases the computing power and storage cost of local hardware, but also is not conducive to the popularization of scale and standardization. In the long run, the hardware cost is high, it needs to be maintained, and with the development of business, the scalability of self-built servers is not good, which is not conducive to the rapid upgrade of robots. Therefore, a reliable "cloud" plays a vital role in reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of the robot.

The services provided by the robot every day will generate a large amount of data, which will bring higher costs if local storage is used, and the data collection cycle is long, the data maintenance is complex, and the stability is difficult to guarantee. With HUAWEI CLOUD's cloud-native database service, information can be stored on the cloud, which can greatly reduce the cost of data collection, help Orion Star continuously analyze and iterate product models, and better leverage the AI advantages brought by China's huge consumer base and service scenarios."

With a more stable, fast, flexible, and low-cost development method provided by HUAWEI CLOUD, Orion Star's engineers can determine what kind of resources can be used to achieve what goals under the control of a certain time and cost, and adjust their technical solutions more flexibly to accelerate the deployment and commercialization of Orion Star's products.

Finally, it can provide consumers with very stable and fast services during the peak business period of public environments such as shopping malls and restaurants; Help operators ensure high-quality services while effectively reducing costs.

At present, in overseas countries with serious epidemics and shortage of manpower, Orion Star has expanded its markets in France, Germany, Netherlands, Korea, Thailand, United States, etc., and many customers have also taken the initiative to become its local core agents.

The industrial digital economy is the general direction and trend, but not any high-tech enterprise can smoothly integrate with the industry, because the needs of different places are huge, and the cooperation between the middle often has to go through complex communication and docking, and a bridge is needed between technology companies and industries, and it must be a bridge that is closely related to the industry and extremely experienced.

Relying on 150 city-oriented government cloud bases and 140 industrial cloud innovation centers across the country, HUAWEI CLOUD provides partners with an industry docking platform, enabling digital services for Internet enterprises that have transformed to B to reach various industries more quickly and accelerate global implementation.

For example, Orion Star is expanding its capabilities by integrating HUAWEI CLOUD's To B business line. Many HUAWEI CLOUD smart campuses are also promoting the deployment of Orion Star service robots to promote the integration of Orion Star with industry and industry.

HUAWEI CLOUD will open up its more than 30 years of ICT technology accumulation and practical achievements in serving various industries through cloud services. On the one hand, it allows enterprises to concentrate on overcoming technical difficulties and saving investment and development costs of related facilities; On the other hand, it is to share its experience and capabilities in the To B field, accelerate the process of industrial digitalization, and enable partners to grow more rapidly, and it is reported that 80% of the top 50 Internet companies have chosen HUAWEI CLOUD.

Under the irreversible trend of the continuous fading of the demographic dividend, relying on the mutual help and strong alliance of technology giants, we may be able to use the strength of science and technology to truly solve the deep-rooted problem of "labor shortage" in the service industry, and also bring more far-reaching impact to industrial upgrading and people's transformation into creative work.

Hand in hand for a win-win situation, a robot dancing on the "cloud".

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