China has become the largest consumer of industrial robots for five consecutive years. The data show that 136,000 industrial robots were added to the domestic market in 2017, an increase of 60% over the same period last year. But at the same time, in the market competition, domestic brand industrial robots are still in the downside for a long time.

Industry experts analysis shows that foreign enterprises take the lead in the field of industrial robots by virtue of their first-mover advantages and technology accumulation, and ABB and other four families occupy about half of the market share of industrial robots. In contrast, China's robotic enterprises are facing the problems of lack of professional talents, scarcity of core parts and inadequate market recognition. In this context, it is argued that the emergence of cooperative robots brings new opportunities for domestic robots to catch up with.


Yi Jianqiang, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and a researcher at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that cooperative robots are a research direction emerging in recent years. "It emphasizes that robots cooperate with people or robots cooperate with robots to accomplish specified tasks together."


According to the Blue Book on the Development of Cooperative Robot Industry in 2017 published by a research institute, the annual composite growth rates of global cooperative robot sales and market scale are 74.71% and 71.23% respectively from 2014 to 2016.


According to the statistics of China Robot Industry Alliance, from 2013 to 2016, the proportion of domestic industrial robots has been around 25% to 32% in terms of sales desk share, and the share increase is not obvious. In the first half of 2017, the sales of domestic industrial robots increased by about 20% year on year, which is much lower than the growth rate of the industry. "Collaborative robot is an effective means for small and medium-sized enterprises and enterprises with flexible production requirements to realize intelligent manufacturing. It is also an opportunity for domestic robotic enterprises to overtake in bends in the market." Li Xiaowen, Tyco Intelligent CEO, who is dedicated to the development of modular cooperative robots, thinks that.


"Collaborative robots based on joint modules can be customized technically at a price of 100,000-300,000 yuan, and can significantly reduce the later use cost through joint reuse. This has a great impact on small batch, customized production mode and small and medium-sized enterprises that can not invest too much money in large-scale transformation of production lines. Greater attraction." Li Xiaowen said.


At the same time, although the core technology of robotics industry in China needs to be strengthened, the complete industrial system in China makes the industrial chain of robots upstream and downstream relatively perfect, and also conducive to the development of cooperative robots.


"Take the harmonic reducer as an example, which is the core component of the robot. There are only a handful of stable manufacturers in the world. The quality of Japanese products is the best, but the price and delivery time are very harsh for domestic enterprises. The domestic harmonic reducer has made remarkable progress and can meet the requirements of cooperative robots. For the cooperative robot customers who are more sensitive to price and flexibility, domestic suppliers have a significant advantage. Li Xiaowen said, "We particularly hope that all parties in the small and medium-sized enterprises and robotics industry chain will pay attention to cooperative robots and reconfigurable robots and contribute to China's intelligent manufacturing and industrial upgrading together."


Yi Jianqiang pointed out that although robots have made great progress in recent years and the ability of environmental perception based on artificial intelligence has been greatly improved, there are still some shortcomings. There is still a gap in judging the intentions of each other. Therefore, to achieve robot collaboration in complex environments, the scientific and technological community and the business community need to work together.