Robots are beyond imagination, the future is here

Guangming Pictures/Visual China

Soft robot fruit and vegetable sorting platform. Xinhua News Agency

Children shake hands with robots. Xinhua News Agency

Single-port laparoscopic surgical robot. Xinhua News Agency

Guangming Pictures/Visual China

Robots that can slide flexibly on snow and ice, robots that can make pancakes, a bionic humanoid robot "Teresa Teng" that is hard to tell whether it is real or fake, singing live, and more than 100 robot dogs tied with cloth tigers dancing in groups on the red carpet...

A wide range of booths and bustling audiences. Recently, the 2022 World Robot Conference was held in Beijing, with more than 130 companies and more than 500 exhibits. This globally watched stage has also become a new product launch show, with more than 30 world-first robots making their debut here, showcasing the most advanced technologies in the field of robotics.

This year's conference breaks the traditional curatorial thinking and innovatively launches a new exhibition model of "robots + application scenarios". While showing the most cutting-edge technology of robot products, it allows the audience to feel the changes that robot technology has brought to our lives in a more immersive way.

While immersing yourself in the exhibition, you may have this thought: what kind of robots do we really need?

Perhaps, your and my ideas are the new direction of the future robotics industry.

Can robots, which are becoming more and more like humans, really replace us?

As soon as you enter the exhibition hall, you can see the simulated humanoid robot Teresa Teng from Dalian TIS Robotics Company singing "I Only Care About You", with her lip movements perfectly matching the lyrics. There is also a bionic robot named "Sier" on the booth, which not only looks exactly like the engineer who designed it, but can also interact with real people. Li Boyang, co-founder and CEO of the company, introduced that the EX robot can show vivid postures and expressions with more than 140 degrees of freedom throughout its body. In the future, we will continue to explore the application of EX robots in the fields of elderly care, corporate front desk, government services, education and popular science.

Humanoid robots not only look like humans, but also have increasingly similar movements to humans. At the booth of the Beijing Institute of Technology Intelligent Robot High-tech Innovation Center, the seventh-generation "Huitong" high-dynamic humanoid robot performed a series of fine movements such as walking, running, and jumping. The person in charge of the booth said that after the upgrade, this robot not only has dexterous fingers with multiple degrees of freedom, but also has increased degrees of freedom in its arms, waist, and head. It can run at a maximum speed of 6 kilometers per hour, jump 0.5 meters high, and jump 1 meter.

Amid the crowd, the reporter noticed a very smart facial expression capture robot. There was a screen in front of it, and when the audience in front of the screen shook their heads, winked, or stuck out their tongues, the robot could immediately imitate them. Interestingly, the engineer next to the robot looked exactly like it.

According to engineer Xier, this robot was developed and manufactured based on him. The robot's skin texture, every frown and smile are no different from those of a real person, and it can express a variety of expressions such as joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness to the extreme.

While experiencing the cutting-edge technology of humanoid robots, the service robots entering ordinary people's homes allow us to more intuitively feel the changes that robotics technology has brought to production and life.

Grind beans, extract coffee, and add a beautiful latte art. In 70 seconds, a cup of coffee made by a robot is ready. With a flexible robotic arm, the robot can accurately locate objects, identify features, and measure information, allowing products of different sizes to be placed in corresponding positions.

Nowadays, robots equipped with flexible robotic arms are also used in express sorting and delivery.

"When the on-site delivery personnel scan the product barcode and put it into the robot flip plate, the 3D sorting robot will go into work and place it into the corresponding order material basket according to the product barcode." At the exhibition, the relevant person in charge of Meituan explained the robot product on the spot - Meituan's smart warehouse robot, which attracted a large number of viewers to stop.

Also unveiled at the event was the fifth-generation smart delivery vehicle independently developed by JD Logistics. According to Wenming, head of the smart terminal of JD Logistics X Research Department, the vehicle can carry a maximum load of 200 kilograms and has a range of 100 kilometers. It integrates 10 core technologies such as high-precision map production, fusion perception, behavior prediction, simulation, and intelligent networking, and can achieve L4 level autonomous driving, providing basic transportation services for the "last mile" of logistics.

"Currently, more than 400 smart express vehicles are in regular operation in 25 cities across the country, including Beijing, Tianjin, and Changshu." Zhe Wenming said that in the Beijing Yizhuang High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone, JD Logistics will conduct experiments and docking with the EUHT wireless private network.

Obviously, the concept of "robot +" is gradually being implemented, forming various application scenarios in agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, medical care, finance, home furnishing and other industries. Data shows that in 2021, the use density of industrial robots in the global manufacturing field has reached 126 units per 10,000 people, nearly doubling from 66 units per 10,000 people in 2015, and the trend of "machine replacing people" is obvious.

Entering the era of “intelligent medicine”, what can robots do for us?

"Wow, so cool!" In the exhibition area of ​​Surui Technology, a group of students gathered together and stared at the single-port laparoscopic surgical robot. When they saw its "snake-like arms" peeling the shell of a quail egg lightly like human hands, while the egg was intact, they couldn't help but praise it. If this robot is used to assist doctors in surgery, it will not only extend the doctors' hands but also broaden their horizons, making minimally invasive surgery more precise and flexible.

Surgical robots are known as the crown jewels in the field of robotics. This single-port laparoscopic surgical robot, independently developed by China and breaking through the "bottleneck" technical difficulties, is comparable to the world's top surgical robots of the same type and is a leader in the world's medical robots. This new type of robot is one of the representatives of many "high-tech" technologies and products unveiled at this conference.

"Medical robots are a typical application of the integration of medicine and engineering. The application of medical robots in interventional medicine can not only alleviate the problem of long learning curve, but also make surgery more precise and standardized, and has a large clinical application space." Duan Feng, director of the Interventional Radiology Department of the First Medical Center of the General Hospital of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, said this at the Forum on Innovation and Development of the Integration of Biomedical Engineering and Smart Healthcare at this conference.

At the booth of Shanghai MicroPort Medical Device Co., Ltd., four surgical robotic arms were operating up and down facing the mold. "The surgical robotic arms are integrated, and the mirror-holding arm can move freely according to the needs of the knife-holding arm. The strong grip of the robotic arms avoids the blurring of vision caused by the shaking of the mirror, which greatly improves the efficiency of the surgery." Xu Qian, a staff member of the minimally invasive robot marketing department of Shanghai MicroPort Medical Device Co., Ltd., told reporters, "What we will do next is to put these machines into mass production, further promote the localization of parts, continue to reduce surgical costs, and enable county-level and municipal-level hospitals to use remote robotic surgery on a large scale."

The robotic arm plays an important role in the above-mentioned remote surgery, and its research and development and manufacturing also integrate many high-tech technologies.

The robotic arm developed by Ruiman Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. confirms this view. The reporter saw that the robotic arm on the booth can be bent into various angles and shake the bottle in the hand with different strengths. The sensitivity is no different from that of a human arm. Such a flexible robotic arm, assembled with a camera and a base, forms a robot shape.

"From six axes to seven axes, it is an important advancement in the design of robotic arms." Wang Zewen, head of the key customer department of Ruiman Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., introduced that the human arm is composed of seven joints, and the seven-axis robotic arm can basically imitate the shape of the human arm. Their contribution to scientific and technological progress is also incomparable to previous robotic arms.

The expo also featured robots that were launched to meet social needs and solve social pain points.

For example, in order to solve the fatigue and stress of medical staff working outdoors for a long time during nucleic acid testing, an intelligent throat swab collection robot came into being. It is reported that the robot has the functions of automatic stripping and grabbing of throat swabs, automatic matching of the information of the person being collected with the sample information, automatic recycling of waste, automatic and rapid disinfection of key parts, rapid adaptation to a variety of sample tubes, and full-process video and voice guidance, which realizes the automation of the entire process of throat swab sample collection and frees the hands of medical staff who collect nucleic acid samples.