The current and future situation of intelligent service robot

The data mining and analysis iiMedia Research released "2016 China Robot Industry Research Report" shows that the sales of service robots will reach 34.9 million units by 2018. And, Chinese government released the robot industry development plan (2016 - 2020), manifesting the robot industry will be officially promoted to national strategy.

At present, economic and technological development and social civilization are the background of the birth of the artificial intelligent robots. When the industrialization level has been improving rapidly, the scientific and technological development has been accelerating and the value of the labor force has been continuously improving. Thus, human being’s repetitive workload need to be overtaken urgently.

In recent years, the application of robots has gradually shifted from the industrial field to the fields of cleaning, education, patients and elderly health care and home service. The innovative AI robotics has developed rapidly. The development of service robot is expected to provide new economic growth and driving force for the development of the national economy.

China's population over 60 years has exceeded 10% of the total population, the aging population will become China's unprecedented challenges. In addition, the proportion of the disabled in China is among the highest in the world. In the near future, care for the elderly and the disabled will be an important burden for society, requiring a lot of robotics in healthcare to provide services to help care for the daily life of the elderly and the disabled. All these are to improve their quality of life, thereby reducing the overall number of social workers and the quality of the demand.

Education requirement for intelligent educational robots will form a huge market. At president and during the promotion of quality education, general education, research university model, the promotion of educational robot courses, hands-on assembly and programming practice can expand the young people's logical thinking ability, this entertaining plus education new model has become an effective means and tools for hi-tech education.

At the same time, China's overall objective situation is demanding pre-school education more and more. With the vigorous development of the domestic pre-school market, pre-school education and entertainment robot for 3-6 year-old children will also have a huge market space.

In the future, intelligent service robots are expected to offer a large quantity of services in the fields of education, catering, shopping guide and so on with the continuous improvement of voice interaction and semantic understanding technology, etc. When the hi-tech giants are deploying and the new players continue to emerge the intelligent service robot industry, only the enterprises with ongoing technology upgrades and product updates service robot in order to stand out in the industry history.

China's intelligent robot developing extremely fast

In 2015, Chinese government issued the plan of the “Made in China 2025” program. The goal of the program is make China the global leader in hi-tech industries such as medical equipment, aerospace equipment, and robotics.

   

Jeff Burnstein, the president of Industrial Robot Automation, has also noticed the changes China have been creating. He stated, “China now has the world’s fastest growing artificial intelligent robot, and the 2025 plan will only speed up that process.”

According to the International Federation of Robotics, China has the largest share of the global robotics market. And now, the robotics market has reached 30 billion USD. The federation’s report also found that in 2015, China accounted for 27% of the world’s total robotics sales and by 2019 China will account for 40% of the world’s total robotics sales.

China’s steady and sustained investment in advanced AI robot has even received attention from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists such as Mark Cuban. Last December, Mark Cuban wrote a letter to then President elect Donald Trump (now President Trump) to invest 100 billion USD into the United States’ robotics industry in order to compete with China.

“We must win the robot race. We are nowhere close to our competitors.” Tim Cook wrote.

Matt Bane, a robist expert and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's digital economy project, pointed out, “China will never deliberately oppose other major powers.” But, what they are doing is focusing on the future by investing billions of dollars in innovative AI robotics and similar technologies such as artificial intelligence, and they do not need to depend on other countries to provide the factories.

“China’s long-term goal is to become the source of low cost labor for the hi-tech industry,” Frank Toby. Frank Toby, editor and chief of the magazine “Robot Report” stated that “This major technological shift is a top priority of China.”

This July, Jeff Burnstein saw great changes at this year’s CIROS exhibition event in Shanghai.

“Both the new old companies are more advanced than they were ever before. You cannot say that they are imitating other companies” Bernstein said. Bernstein also stated, “China hopes to become the world’s leading supplier of artificial intelligence robotics, and they are well on their way to achieving that goal.”

Robotics-as-a-service helps your business in various ways

Anyone who's familiar with cloud computing might know about software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and other "as-a-service" delivery models. But they might be not be aware of the latest iteration: robotics-as-a-service (RaaS).

RaaS also leverages the cloud, and makes it possible for organizations to integrate robots and embedded devices into the web and cloud computing environments. This capability will become increasingly important as robots become more common in work environments such as warehouses, distribution centers, and stores.

With RaaS, data captured by artificial intelligent robots — such as customer preferences or inventory status — can be stored on a cloud-based system and retrieved as needed by human workers. This type of service can provide even more value if a company is operating a fleet of hundreds of robots, each performing a variety of tasks.

The RaaS provider could handle maintenance of the robots as well as integration between the robots and databases used across the enterprise. The advantages of this model, much like with cloud services in general, can include cost savings, easier management and scalability, and greater flexibility.

Currently the term "robotics-as-a service" is used to describe two separate robotics approaches, said Dan Kara, practice director for innovative AI robotics at research firm ABI Research.

First there is RaaS as a technical method. Often referred to as "Cloud service humanoid robots," it includes internet-connected robots using cloud based, pay-as-you-go, computational and data storage resources.

RaaS is also the term applied to business models where robotics systems are rented on a monthly or quarterly basis, with often with technical support, real-time monitoring, and other services included.

Technical- and business-oriented RaaS approaches are often combined, Kara said.

The emergence of RaaS reflects the broader move to services-based models in technology.

"The general trend among many technology providers is a long-term migration away from selling products to selling services beyond the usual incremental revenue from support, maintenance and upgrades charges," Kara said. "Services are recurrent revenue, and are looked on favorably by both technology providers and the investment community. Like the technology sector at large, suppliers of commercial service robot have adopted robotics-as-a-service business models and this trend is accelerating."

Both users of robotics technologies and robotics suppliers benefit from RaaS business arrangements, Kara said. "Service-oriented solutions are not uncommon in the robotics sector, where the high cost of platforms and risk aversion to new technologies and applications can impede growth," he said.

In addition, for some types of robotic systems a business model that relies on hardware sales is untenable, even if there are charges for maintenance, upgrades, customization and so on. There are also technical reasons for the RaaS approach, Kara said. For example, the computational resources available for a given advanced AI robot might be inadequate for the task at hand. In this case, a cloud robotics approach might be suitable.

Robotics companies that employ a RaaS business model typically offer emerging technologies whose value proposition and total cost of ownership are largely unknown. Kara said.

Representative companies employing a RaaS business model include PrecisionHawk (drone-based surveying for agriculture), Sanbot (Robot for home, enterprises, retail, hospitality, healthcare and education), Aethon (mobile robots for healthcare logistics), InTouch Health (mobile robotic telepresence), and Liquid Robotics (unmanned underwater vehicles).

Commercial service robot to reach $17 billion in the world by 2020

The "China Robot Industry Development Report” was just issued by the robot industry research of China Institute of Electronics on August 30th, 2017.

According to the report, at present, the Chinese robot market has entered a period of rapid growth. In 2017, the domestic robot market is expected to reach $ 6.28 billion, and the average growth rate during 2012-2017 is 28%. Among them, industrial robots make up 4.22 billion US dollars, intelligent service robots make up 1.32 billion US dollars, and the other are special robots, around 740 million US dollars.

Among them, the Chinese home service robot, medical service robot and public service robot respectively present 530 million US dollars, 410 million US dollars and 380 million US dollars; home service robot market growth is relatively leading.

By 2020, the rapid development of emerging robots applied in new scenarios such as parking robots and retail service robots used in supermarkets or shopping malls will make the market size exceed $ 2.9 billion.

Behind the growth of China's service robot industry, the core is the increase in aging population which causes the increases of human costs. In addition, policy and capital support, the development of artificial intelligence technology has also boosted the growth of the service robot market.

With the acceleration of population aging, the huge manpower demand in pension, medical, education and other aspects creates the rapid expansion of intelligent service robot, especially the care robot for elderly. As of the end of 2016, China's population aged over 60 has reached 230 million, accounting for 16.7% of the total population.

At present, China's intelligence level of service robot has been rapidly improved, shoulder to shoulder with the first international echelon. The report pointed out that China's number of patent applications in the field of artificial intelligence and the United States are in the same order of magnitude, especially the increase in computer vision, intelligent voice applications and other application. This gave birth to a number of innovative start-ups. At the same time, China has made some progress in innovative AI robotics such as multi-model human-computer interaction technology, bionic materials and structure, modular self-reconfiguration technology and so on.

China's service robot industry has not yet shape stably. Facing a good market development opportunities, high-frequency demand intelligent service robots become the main investment direction. In recent years, some enterprises that use robots go into robot industry by performing independent research and development, investment and acquisition and other means. And through the comprehensive application of artificial intelligence technology to build intelligent service robots, a great number of innovative entrepreneurial enterprises Dji, Ecovacs, Sanbot service robot, i robots and other enterprises have been recognized by the market.