From smart factory to transparent factory, how should industrial robot companies evolve

In recent years, the development momentum of my country's robotics industry has been good. Many outstanding companies have emerged and many outstanding products have been launched, such as industrial robots, collaborative robots, medical robots, agricultural robots, and so on. But, many times, these robots are a single product, but if they are applied to a certain scene, they often need to use a lot of robots.

Take industrial robots as an example. Most robot companies sell an only semi-finished products. They also need the system integrator to form a complete process intelligent unit for a specific process; then, the factory integrator is required to integrate this intelligent unit. It is further integrated into the assembly line of the factory, and only in this way can it be considered as a completed product.

Gan Zhongxue, chairman of Zhichang Technology Group Co., Ltd. pointed out that there are many system integrators and factory integrators of industrial robots, but the profits are very low and it takes a lot of time.

So, is it possible to turn a robot into a mobile phone and a computer? After a customer purchases a new robot, they can start using it after simple settings?

At the 7th Robot Summit, Gan Middle School shared the theme of "Building a Ubiquitous Intelligent Robot System and Giving birth to a Real-time Transparent Robot Factory".

He believes that we have entered the era of ubiquitous intelligence, and proposed the concept of ubiquitous intelligent robots characterized by "the ternary integration of humans, machines, and objects". Under the concept of ubiquitous intelligent robots, industrial cluster brains + real-time transparent robot factories will gradually become a reality.

What is a ubiquitous intelligent robot?

In the view of Gan Middle School, ubiquitous intelligence simply means that intelligence is everywhere and everywhere. Ubiquitous robot refers to the distributed brain of the robot, which can be in the cloud, in the robotic arm, or in any other part, relying on the network to connect in the middle. However, the ubiquitous robot is different from the ubiquitous intelligent robot. The ubiquitous robot is to distribute and network the robot, while the ubiquitous intelligent robot is in the middle of environmental intelligence, and all actions are the interaction between intelligence, including machines and The interaction of the machine, the interaction between people, and the interaction between the entire machine and the environment, this interaction is all intelligent, and this is a truly ubiquitous intelligent robot.

To this end, Zhichang Technology Group has launched three core products, Worker Bee, Zhang Feng, and Qunfeng. Among them, the worker bee robot has self-sensing, self-adaptive, self-learning, self-programming, and self-driving robot products, and it is based on technology; Zhangfeng Robot is a factory platform with worker bee robot products as modules, under the dispatch of a distributed brain, To realize the production and management coordination of the whole plant; the swarm robot is to empower industrial elements, nodes, and entity enterprises to realize the sustainable evolution of industry sharing of "personalized customization, networked production, large-scale collaboration, and intelligent services" New ecology.

At this summit, Zhichang Technology Group also launched AE-Net OS, an intelligent brain operating system for the robotics industry group. According to reports, the system is modeled after the bionic thinking of bees and octopuses, that is, using swarm intelligence and distributed parallel intelligence. Construct an operating system oriented to the industrial chain, the bottom layer is the machine-connected layer, realizing real-time online equipment; the middle layer is the data layer, which solves the optimization of process flow, and the upper layer is the value layer, which solves the problem of resource optimization and scheduling.

Feng Haoran, vice president of technology of Zhichang Group, introduced that AE-Net OS is an open-source robot operating system, which mainly empowers robot development, system integration companies, and component robot ecology, allowing the robot development process to be fast, cycle controllable, superior in performance, and to provide applications Ecological enhancement of service value.

AE-Net OS is based on its ubiquitous intelligent controller. Feng Haoran pointed out that customers can purchase corresponding services and products according to the scale of their own factories, which can mean buying intelligent controllers and systems, and then connecting to their own existing robots. Management, you can also purchase a complete set of equipment from Zhichang Technology.

Its ubiquitous intelligent controller takes the robot controller as the core, expands the logic control, communication interface, and visual recognition capabilities, installs eyes, hands, and brains on the device, and gives it intelligence, and integrates the real-time operation data and control data of the device with private Cloud synchronization.

"Relying on the ubiquitous intelligent controller, we have developed a dual-arm robot that fully replaces manual work through dual-arm collaboration. It is currently widely used in our on-site flexible actions, such as threading steel wires, loading and unloading with identification, etc. Qunzhi network control The device constitutes the middle layer of our operating system, the group intelligence network controller, by connecting the ubiquitous intelligent controller, constitutes a real-time data network, and forms the edge computing and control center, the controller cluster forms a controlled cloud through distributed collaboration, The APP on the control cloud forms a workshop-level or factory-level real-time control platform, and realizes data redundancy, resource sharing and balancing capabilities.” Feng Haoran said.

According to him, Zhichang Group has built a real-time transparent factory for a steel cord company. Through the implantation of AE-Net OS, it has successfully realized the full real-time production of the company. Through the millisecond-level data response capability, the digital twin technology With the support, the production process can be simulated, predicted, and optimized, which can greatly improve production efficiency, reduce waste products, and reduce labor requirements. The current results have been remarkable, and a comprehensive reduction of 50% can be achieved. Through real-time tracking of product quality, waste products are reduced, and the company's material circulation speed is increased by 1-3%, and an annual benefit of 200-300 million yuan is created. It is reported that the system has also been extended to the five major industries of metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, textiles, enterprises, and furniture.