Road Innovation: AGV empowers manufacturing upgrades

In 2012, Amazon's acquisition of Kiva boiled the entire AGV industry.

"Kiva, as a benchmark company in the AGV industry, is also a very successful start-up company. This acquisition represents an international application trend of AGV." Cao Shuyang, co-founder of Malu Innovation, told the CEConline .

However, by 2015, the global AGV market began to usher in a period of rapid market development. At that time, the development of AGV in China was still in its infancy, and Malu Innovation was established in this year. "In 2015, China's AGV industry is in a market blank period, so we are very optimistic about its future development prospects." Cao Shuyang said that Malu Innovation CEO Liu Zhe has rich experience in robot research and development, and CTO Wang Yuexiang is familiar with machine learning and data analysis. .

AGV needs the support of core technologies such as cluster scheduling algorithms, visual navigation, and big data analysis, which is exactly in line with the advantageous technologies accumulated by the two founders with technical backgrounds. Based on the accumulation of the founder's AGV underlying technology and core algorithm field, they started the road of entrepreneurship.

Starting from e-commerce warehousing

In 2015, the rapid development of e-commerce has driven the rapid expansion of the market scale of e-commerce logistics and warehousing, and also set off the explosive development of the domestic logistics market. At that time, the warehousing manpower was obviously unable to keep up, and e-commerce platforms such as Ali and JD wanted to improve the efficiency of warehousing work through warehousing automation and intelligence. This is a node for the application scenario of AGV. Most of the AGV cars that served in the automobile manufacturing and home appliance industries before began to slowly turn to the field of e-commerce warehousing.

The first project of Malu Innovation is to start from the e-commerce warehousing AGV. In 2017, they completed the industry's largest single warehouse 135 AGV e-commerce project. AGV trolleys in e-commerce warehouses mainly replace manual product selection, which was originally the most employed part of e-commerce warehouses. After using AGVs, the operation efficiency of the entire warehouse can be improved and a lot of labor costs can be saved.

"First, after the use of AGVs in e-commerce warehouses, almost 2/3 of the warehouse staff can be saved; second, the problems of wrong picking and missed inspection often occur in pure manual product picking, which leads to express delivery. After arriving at the customer's home, it was discovered that the wrong product was sent. After the AGV system was deployed in the warehouse, the error rate of picking products was almost reduced to 0, which greatly improved the customer's contract performance. Third, we will conduct real-time big data on the data collected by the entire AGV system. Analysis, such as analyzing inventory and hot-selling products, and then providing customers with some sales-end suggestions, and then making corresponding strategic adjustments for sales." Cao Shuyang told the CEConline.

Different from the high-speed explosive growth in previous years, the growth rate of China's AGV market in 2019 has stabilized, and the hot trend has gradually cooled. Especially in the e-commerce industry, the number of projects that have been implemented is very limited. Although the automation penetration rate of overall e-commerce warehousing is less than 1%, the demand for a large number of small and medium-sized e-commerce is far from being developed.

Talking about the reasons, Cao Shuyang believes that when customers invest in a system, they will calculate the return on investment. At present, many e-commerce customers may not have such financial strength to invest in an AGV system. Most manufacturing companies have very high labor costs and high customization requirements. They are relatively easy to accept a system that can reduce labor costs. For small and medium-sized e-commerce companies, labor costs are not a particularly big development bottleneck, and it takes a gradual process for them to accept AGVs.

"Actually, the domestic AGV market will be calm in 2019, mainly affected by the overall economic environment. Customers will be cautious about investing millions of equipment and systems." Cao Shuyang told the CEConline. However, in the long run, it is a trend that AGVs replace some labor, but AGVs will not show an explosive growth.

Return to the manufacturing scene

GGII's "2020 China Mobile Robot (AGV) Industry Research Report" shows that with the entry of major e-commerce logistics giants into the AGV field, many AGV start-ups The living space of enterprises has been further squeezed. Judging from the dynamics of various leading enterprises, there are two small trends: returning to the manufacturing scene, opening up the production-warehousing links in the factory; extending and expanding to the international market.

In September 2018, Malu Innovation signed a contract with Chery Jaguar Land Rover automation transformation and production line material handling project, and officially entered the manufacturing industry. "The AGV system in the e-commerce scene is relatively isolated, and the smooth operation of the AGV project in the manufacturing plant requires more factors to be considered, and there cannot be any error rate. The domestic manufacturing industry has the greatest demand, and we will continue to do manufacturing in depth this year. layout." Cao Shuyang said.

In the process of the development of Industry 4.0, manufacturing plants will use more human-machine collaborative work mode. How to ensure the safety of human-machine is an important factor for AGV manufacturers to consider. Cao Shuyang believes, "This requires adding a lot of protection modules to the machine hardware, such as upgrading sensors. In manufacturing application scenarios, AGV cars will use high-performance laser sensors, or use multi-sensor fusion technology to suit different Customer scenarios, working conditions, and no need for floor renovation, can ensure the normal operation of AGVs in scenarios where humans and machines are mixed.”

The future of the manufacturing industry corresponds to a flexible production model, which requires Robots are more intelligent, which has high requirements for software scheduling, scheduling algorithms, and path planning in the background of AGV manufacturers, preventing path conflicts when dozens or hundreds of AGVs are running at the same time in a system, and ensuring the smooth operation of the entire system.

In addition, Malu Innovation has also independently developed and put into use different forms of trolleys, such as forklift trolleys that are more suitable for manufacturing, and they will develop and improve the product series in the next step to meet the individual needs of customers.

The demand for AGVs in China is relatively large, especially in the past few years, the demand for e-commerce has grown rapidly, providing opportunities for domestic AGV manufacturers to exercise and cultivate a group of strong AGV companies. Cao Shuyang said: "Although the output and production complexity of domestic factories are relatively high, and e-commerce warehousing is also the most difficult in the world, AGVs currently have high operating efficiency in domestic customer scenarios. The requirements of technology and functions will become higher and higher, which also forces us to improve quickly and iterate technology to meet the needs of Chinese customers.”

In fact, not only in China, but also the global demand for AGVs Very large, especially some developed countries, such as Europe, Japan, and South Korea, are facing problems of aging population, difficulty in recruiting, and high labor costs. They are much more urgent than China for AGV equipment and automation systems.

Cao Shuyang said that strengthening the layout of overseas key countries and regions is also the focus of Malu Innovation's work in the coming year. In fact, China's AGV manufacturers, especially the leading companies, are also internationally leading in their comprehensive capabilities, which also determines the speed at which domestic AGV manufacturers can extend and expand in the international market.

Improve product competitiveness

From the perspective of market conditions, although the growth rate of China's AGV market has stabilized in 2019, the competition between manufacturers is more direct and cruel.

"There are many factors for the steady growth of the AGV market, which is the only way for technological development. However, the annual demand growth is still very fast, especially in some industries that have not heard of it for a few years. Said that they will have AGV demand." Cao Shuyang told the CEConline.

In 2020, the entire AGV industry will have a new round of demand release. If major domestic AGV manufacturers want to seize the opportunity in the market, in addition to core technical barriers, they should also have two aspects Ability. One is to have complete product capabilities, that is, to produce robots that are stable and available. The second is to have the ability to understand the subdivision industry.

Malu Innovation's employees are mainly R&D personnel and have their own manufacturing plants, which also guarantees the technological change and production progress of their products. According to Cao Shuyang, the production links of Malu Innovation are generally arranged according to the orders, and usually make some forecasts for the production of orders, so as to ensure the stocking within a certain range, which can make the production links more stable.

"If we encounter some sudden large orders, we will take some measures to deal with them, such as increasing the number of workers, reducing the requirements for workers' skills in the production process, and making the hardware design more modular. Help the sudden order to be completed smoothly." Cao Shuyang told the CEConline.

At present, the localization rate of the domestic AGV market is very high, reaching more than 80%. In the domestic market where foreign products occupy the mainstream in the field of robots, the localization rate of the mobile robot market is unique. Cao Shuyang analyzed, "The cost advantage of domestic AGVs is very large, and most of its core components are from domestic suppliers, and the quality is very reliable." However, in order to improve the competitiveness of products, AGV manufacturers need to continue to update the selection of spare parts to achieve optimal Value for money.

The key is to continuously improve our own product development, and consider how to optimize costs, and then find a more matching supplier, because the supplier's core components are also constantly being optimized. For example, the technology of power batteries has been updated all the time. The batteries currently used by Malu Innovation are completely different from those in the previous years. They all use products from new technical school suppliers, which are of great help to the performance improvement of the entire machine. "All in all, we must pay close attention to the development of related industries and follow up the research and development of new technologies in order to continuously optimize the supply chain." Cao Shuyang said.

Faced with the gradual segmentation of the industry and the emergence of new industries, how can AGV manufacturers gain the trust of customers and quickly complete the deployment of products? "In fact, for us, this is a test of comprehensive ability, and hardware, software and other aspects must be ready at any time." Because it is impossible to use an e-commerce AGV technology or product to apply to other industries such as automobiles, medicine, and manufacturing, Especially hardware may not apply. In addition, the scheduling system included in the software and the pattern of the entire AGV task arrangement are actually quite different in each industry.

It is very important for AGV manufacturers to understand the needs of customers in the entire process, so that they can make solutions that meet customer needs, and finally make standardized AGV products adapt to the individual needs of customers and be embedded in their Industry-specific application scenarios. Cao Shuyang believes, "This requires the team to be equipped with experts in related industries to understand the needs of customers, because it is very important whether your solutions can make customers pay. Of course, the completion of these solutions takes time, and only with different Only customers who want to make plans, think of countermeasures, and implement different projects can grow into an industry-level solution provider.”