Article reprinted to: Robot lecture hall
In 2020, with only 55 days left, robot companies are vying for the only development safe haven in China under the epidemic.
Although the global market has been significantly affected by the black swan of the epidemic, the opportunity under the counter trend has been pointed out in the IFR Global Robot Industry Development Report-entering China to seize new areas of food, medicine, and daily chemicals that still need to be explored.
This is the key to the survival and development of robot companies under the global economic contraction caused by the impact of the epidemic, and it may also be a new opportunity.
On the one hand, all walks of life are facing a cold winter and demand is shrinking. On the other hand, under the new normal pattern of the epidemic, countless companies suffering from the epidemic have decided to try to transform the difficulties under the epidemic into automation projects.
The demand for robots has increased sharply, which is the general trend.
The four major families of robots have undoubtedly seen the trend of China’s increasing coverage from the automotive industry’s stock market to 3C electronics, food packaging and other general industrial areas. New adaptive products from KUKA and FANUC have emerged one after another, and the ABB epidemic It also quickly acquired Codian Robotics, a parallel robot company, to improve its product technology system, and accelerate its deployment in the growing field of parallel robots in order to quickly capture a larger market.
Seeing the opportunities in the general industrial market such as China's 3C electronics and food packaging under the epidemic, it is of course not only foreign-funded enterprise ABB, but also the domestic leader in the parallel market, Astro Boy.
Astro Boy’s Thunder series and Diamond Pro series, which are equipped with AtomMotion3.0 version, will be released at a special time in the fourth quarter of 2020, in an effort to further win the stable and rapid growth of Chinese food, medicine, and daily chemicals. The industry market, the determination to challenge ABB's parallel market share is at a glance.
(New Astro Boy Pro series)
(Thunder series new product)
As various industries face tight demand in the cold winter, the two new products that Astro Boy has placed high hopes for fully opening up the market, can they lead Astro Boy, a domestically produced product that has just entered its seventh year but can compete with ABB on the same stage? Upstart, taking the lead?
The race for the first throne
This competition actually planted the seeds a few years ago.
In 1999, ABB first purchased the Delta patent, and quickly launched the IRB340 flexible picking robot on this basis, which received excellent market response. In 2000, Tianjin University, which also saw the value of this high-speed flexible picking robot, chose autonomous Carry out further technical research on high-speed parallel robots.
In 2006, when he received the admission notice from the School of Mechanical Engineering of Tianjin University, Liu Songtao might not have thought that ten years later, he would become the entrepreneurial representative of Tianjin University in the transformation of high-speed parallel robot research and development achievements, as the leader of China's parallel robot industry. Enterprises, go to compete with the veteran parallel robot player ABB.
In 2019, Astro Boy has maintained the top sales position of domestic brands for three consecutive years, and is in a leading position among domestic parallel robot companies, and is only 1% away from the number one ABB.
Since its establishment in 2013, Astro Boy has surpassed many predecessors and successfully broke into the high-end brand of parallel robots. Nowadays, the rapid recovery and development opportunities of the Chinese market under the epidemic have given Astro Boy and the old foreign robot manufacturer ABB the opportunity to officially start the ring competition.
The newly released Thunder series and Diamond Pro series, which are positioned at mid-to-high end, will definitely enhance the market's awareness of parallel robots and will also accelerate Astro Boy's sprint towards the first place in the Chinese parallel robot market.
Continue to sculpt products, focus on controller research and development, and focus on ontology business. Astro Boy’s focus is "clear and powerful"
Times make heroes, and Astro Boy has risen from the strong power that was born today, and the times are also changing.
The growth of a company from 0 to 1 is inseparable from the global robot development trend. The decline in domestic employment and rising labor costs are also important reasons for the increase in the demand for the robot market. It can be said that Astro Boy is a representative of the dividends of the Chinese robot market. .
For example, judging from the latest employment data, the number of laborers in China between the ages of 16 and 59 is declining. The latest data is 890 million people. Of the 890 million people, a large part of them are engaged in the service industry in big cities. In terms of labor costs, domestic employment costs are increasing at an annual rate of about 11%.
In terms of labor costs, in 2008, the average annual salary of a worker was about 24,000 yuan, and in 2020 it was about 72,000 yuan. However, the cost of robots is currently decreasing at a rate of 10% per year. For example, the cost of industrial robots has dropped from 600,000 yuan/set to 400,000 yuan/set, and then to 300,000 yuan/set. The current price Even less than 150,000/set.
At the same time, the development of the parallel robot industry from 2014 to 2019 coincides with the convergence and rapid development of the food, medicine, cosmetics, and 3C electronics industries in China. These industries require continuous reduction in the size of robots, continuous decline in prices, and precision. Gradually increase, while the demand for speed and stability continues to rise.
(Astro Boy used in moon cake production lin)
Driven by this general trend, the number of parallel robot services for food, medicine, cosmetics, and 3C electronics has increased sharply.
Wang Tianmiao, a doctoral supervisor of Beihang University and honorary director of the Robotics Research Institute, once analyzed: “New energy vehicles, automotive electronics, LED panel processing, machining (mechanical processing) and plastic chemicals; food, packaging, logistics, medical, hotel chains, Security inspection and agriculture, these industries have increased demand for "unmanned", and the next growth space of the robot industry will also come from these industries.
Astro Boy has just seized this wave of historical opportunities and gradually formed its own core advantages in combination with market demand.
Focusing on the ontology business and building a channel system is the core of the development of Astro Boy.
Through a large number of expansion of service promotion suppliers in the application industry, and at the same time emphasizing product service thinking from the market level, Astro Boy continues to integrate business forces in the industry and increase the product penetration of parallel robots.
At the same time, on the basis of maintaining this good channel structure, we continue to develop products for the needs of integrators and expand new application scenarios.
By focusing on the research and development of new control systems and new models, and continuing to sculpt products, after 7 years of business, Astro Boy has continued to iterate its products, and now has a full range of parallel robots (Diamond, King Kong, Lightning, Hurricane, Thunder, S6) , Covering the needs of people's livelihood industries such as 3C electronics, food, pharmaceuticals, and daily chemicals. In order to further meet the needs of customers, the founder Liu Songtao also led the technical team to conduct multi-dimensional verification on terminal application scenarios, and strive to explore more new application scenarios.
Because of the focus on the main body business, in order to continue to improve the performance of the main body, the current two new Astro Boy products this time are equipped with the new control system AtomMotion3.0 for the first time. On the basis of the previous generation of products, AtomMotion3.0 further optimizes the algorithm to achieve a comprehensive increase in the robot speed. At the same time, the speed planning is further optimized to reduce the vibration improvement accuracy. At the same time, it also achieves improvements in the torque control. The Thunder series and Diamond Pro series equipped with AtomRobot3.0 can adapt to more different scenarios and meet more stringent technical requirements.
(Astro Boy Diamond Pro series dual machine comparison demonstration platfor)
The effectiveness of this grounded fast market strategy is remarkable. Over the past three years, more than 200 integrator customers have chosen Astro Boy, supporting the rapid and large-scale growth of Astro Boy.
Behind the rapid development, Astro Boy's service is also logically clear, that is, it does not disappoint any trusted customer.
This has something to do with founder Liu Songtao's encounters in the early days of entrepreneurship.
At the beginning of his business in 2013, Liu Songtao, who had a technical background and focused on research, chose to focus on product development first, but after the product was designed, no one in the market paid the bill.
At that time, the industrial robot market was basically monopolized by imported products. How to get a company accustomed to using imported equipment to recognize that an independent startup company was only in the experimental testing stage was a difficult problem in front of Liu Songtao at that time, and the company was once in trouble. .
When almost giving up, Shijiazhuang Siyao Co., Ltd. chose to believe in the laboratory data provided by this young entrepreneurial young man, became Liu Songtao's first industry benchmark customer, and opened Astro Boy's market in the pharmaceutical industry.
The actual production data also showed that the accuracy of the robot has increased by 20%, which is better than similar foreign products. So Liu Songtao's products finally opened up a market. Although the company only sold two devices in the first year of its establishment, this trust The preciousness made Liu Songtao firmly choose to go on.
(Astro Boy Packing in Shijiazhuang Siyao Infusion Soft Ba)
Strengthening service, guaranteeing satisfaction, and not losing trust have become the criteria that Astro Boy has always adhered to.
To this end, Astro Boy has also established a more complete pre-sales technical support department and after-sales service guarantee department for the integrator system, from the professional technical answering and program review of pre-sales technicians to a strict process control risk system during sales. , And then to the 24-hour after-sales service, to ensure the rationality and smoothness of the product to the enterprise, solve the worries of the buying enterprise, and promote the efficiency of the integrator's entire process from sales to service.
Product positioning is in line with ABB, pricing is lower than ABB, service is higher than ABB, in just a few years, rich and diverse product system, professional production and delivery process and efficient after-sales service team, in the mutual achievement with integrators, Astro Boy successfully ranks in the forefront of the parallel robot market.
Technology-driven product iteration
After nearly 7 years of cultivation, the market for parallel robots has basically matured, and it has proven to be the fastest growing category among all industrial robot categories, and it is also the most resistant to economic cycle segmentation category.
But under the rapid development, Liu Songtao also keenly saw the vacancies left by the prosperous parallel robot industry in technology precipitation and team training.
Slow down, sum up experience and lessons, accumulate R&D strength, polish product performance, and prepare technology and team for a higher level of charge. This is what Astro Boy has been insisting on since 2018. This accumulation is now being accumulated. , The two new products demonstrate the strong product development capabilities of the Astro Boy Robotics team.
Beginning in the first half of 2019, the development of industrial robots has gradually entered an adjustment period from the previous high-flying progress. The shuffle brought by the industry has eliminated backward companies, and more people have also realized the problems of the rapid development of parallel robots.
Where will parallel robot products go next? What is the next step for technological innovation? How to continue to improve product power? It has become a common problem facing the world's parallel robot companies.