Cao Yunan, CEO of Elite: The limitations of collaborative robots are no longer in the cost, and the market will explode in 5 years

With the continuous advancement of industrial digitalization, the robot industry is becoming an important tool for the digital transformation of traditional industries.

Cao Yunan, CEO of Elite: The limitations of collaborative robots are no longer in the cost, and the market will explode in 5 years

According to data from the GGII Research Institute, the sales volume of collaborative robots in China in 2021 will be 18,623 units, a year-on-year increase of 87.62%; the market size was 2.039 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 76.84%, a significant increase; From 2016 to 2021, the average annual compound growth rate of collaborative robot sales and market size was 51.94% and 41.46%, respectively.

At the same time, the scale of financing in the field of collaborative robots continues to rise. In 2021, the financing scale of China's collaborative robots exceeded 5 billion yuan, and the average single financing amount exceeded 387 million yuan, far exceeding the data of historical years. In the first half of 2022, China's collaborative robot field completed 6 financing cases again, among which Elite announced the completion of hundreds of millions of yuan in Series C1 financing.

Over the past few years, Elite has grown its revenue by more than 100% every year. Cao Yunan, CEO of Elite, told Titanium Media that from the basic logic, the ultimate goal of collaborative robots is to achieve "one-to-one substitution", that is, for heavy repetitive labor, robots can basically be replaced. This logic also determines that the adaptation opportunities for collaborative robots in the future will be very extensive.

The collaborative robot industry is gradually maturing

In fact, the main R&D direction of Elite at the beginning of its establishment was not collaborative robots, but focused on robot control systems.

"In 2019, we think that this will be a new product track from the perspective of the platform attributes, application expression and cost structure of collaborative robots. As a domestic brand, Elite has the opportunity to re-divide the market competition pattern in the future. Cao Yunan said that since 2019, Elite has fully focused on the research and development of collaborative robot products.

From the perspective of the logic of industrial development, it was at the time of the intergenerational alternation of industrial robots and collaborative robots.

Previously, traditional industrial robots have solved many problems for factories, improving production efficiency and reducing labor costs. However, as industrial robots are increasingly used, the pain point of their high deployment cost has been difficult to solve. Take the most typical arc welding robot as an example, the basic price is between 110,000 and 150,000 RMB, but its deployment cost is 3-4 times the selling price. In addition, the complex and fixed deployment mode of industrial robots also makes them lose their work flexibility and is difficult to adapt to the needs of "flexible production".

Compared with traditional industrial robots, the deployment and application of collaborative robots are more flexible, and can achieve a variety of work advantages such as rapid landing, multi-task collaboration, and position mobility. At the same time, the later operation and maintenance costs of collaborative robots are lower, and small and medium-sized enterprises can also support operating costs.

Benefiting from the change of industry trends, since 2019, Elite has interacted and cooperated with a number of vision and AMR chassis manufacturers based on projects, and gradually iterated the one-stop solution for collaborative robots.

In the 3C industry CNC machine loading and unloading and material transfer applications, Elite collaborative robots have been successfully introduced into the production lines of well-known domestic 3C manufacturing industries and Apple cooperative suppliers. This project involves a total of 10 buffer lines in the production line, one buffer line has 10 machines, through multiple composite robots for one-to-many loading and reclaiming, and one tray is loaded with 30 mobile phone glass back covers.

"At the end of 2022, we launched our new cobot product, the CS series. From the underlying operating system, embedded hardware and software, process package and top computing power, and the module joint technology of collaborative robots, Elite has achieved great improvements. Cao Yunan told Titanium Media.

According to Cao Yunan, the CS series of cobots covers a variety of models with a maximum load from 3kg to 24kg, and has been upgraded in terms of safety protection level, ease of use and ecological technology, all of which can be flexibly deployed in wall-mounted, ground-mounted, and upside-down ways.

This is the world's second-generation collaborative robot completed by a Chinese company, and it is also the largest mass-produced collaborative robot in China. CS series has become the first collaborative robot product in China to pass ISO 13849, ISO 10218, EN 60204, ISO 12100 certification, which can be configured with dual-channel design safety input and output signals, and has obtained CE, UL, RoHS, Semi, functional safety certification (ISO13849), and intelligent level certificate.

Ecological derivative ability, the biggest competition point in the future

With the gradual maturity of cobot products, the biggest concern in this industry is no longer cost, because cobots are cheap enough. At present, the limitation of the adaptation of collaborative robots is scalability, whether they can achieve stronger ecological derivative capabilities according to application scenarios. "

Based on the design considerations of ecological derivative capabilities, CS has designed more IO communication ports and stronger driving currents, and has also built an open foundation for the native Python scripting language and Java secondary development platform. Based on this, external companies can use it to realize modular development, as well as the access of working modules, the import and packaging of programming code, and finally realize rapid debugging and use, and shorten the construction period.

Cao Yunan said that many processes of collaborative robots still need time to polish. For example, at the site where the collaborative robot operates the loading and unloading of the machine tool, how to schedule multi-machine collaboration involves the optimization of the action path, the optimization of the operation action, and how to diagnose and correct the problem after it occurs. "The process of optimization requires a lot of data analysis and screening, which is a gradual and slowly improving process."

According to Cao Yunan, the industries that are currently widely used for collaborative robots include 3C, automobiles, lithium energy, biomedicine, semiconductors and other industries, and industries such as lithium energy, biomedicine and semiconductors are the most important incremental markets in the future.

GGII data shows that in 2021, more than 5,600 cobots were sold in China's 3C industry, an increase of about 80% compared to 2020. The production line of the 3C industry is highly flexible, fast changeover, and can realize the production needs of small batches and diversification, which also provides opportunities for the development of collaborative robots in the 3C industry. The 3C industry still has high incremental expectations, especially the development of application scenarios such as composite robots.

In the automobile and auto parts industry, collaborative robots are mainly used in scenarios with large manpower demand and high proportion of repetitive labor, and Elite collaborative robots can be used for central control screen tightening, automobile engine cylinder head inspection, automobile seat grinding, automobile door slat buckle installation, and automotive battery cover gluing.

Since 2019, Elite has nearly doubled its year-over-year growth every year. Based on our performance since the first quarter of 2022 and the release of some orders at the end of 2022, we expect to achieve 100% growth in 2023. "

Cao Yunan said that in the next five years, collaborative robots will have the opportunity to explode with the maturity of products and the enhancement of capabilities. The main bottlenecks in the industry today are customer satisfaction and the capabilities of cobots. Once the product breaks through this critical value, the explosive growth of the cobot industry is no longer the logic of industrial growth, with a growth rate of only 10%-20% per year. "

Up to now, Elite has cooperated with more than 50 manufacturers at home and abroad, supporting 100 kinds of accessory combinations, covering most of the mainstream AGVs, 2D/3D vision, grippers, lifting columns, force sensors, etc.; It has established branches in North America, Europe and Japan, as well as sales networks in Southeast Asia, Korea, India, the Middle East and Australia.

Cao Yunan, CEO of Elite: The limitations of collaborative robots are no longer in the cost, and the market will explode in 5 years

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