Major new products launched: Hikvision Robotics' evolution in 2022-EEWORLD

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As the demographic dividend gradually disappears and the uncertainties of the epidemic continue to overlap, industrial manufacturing companies, large e-commerce platforms, retail companies, express logistics companies, etc. have increasing demands for unmanned and digitalized warehousing and manufacturing. Mobile robots have also become one of the key logistics automation equipment in smart factories, and the industry as a whole has entered a stage of rapid growth.

Data from Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII) shows that China's mobile robot market experienced explosive growth in 2021, with overall sales reaching 63,769 units, a sales growth rate of more than 57%, and a market size of 7.929 billion yuan, a growth rate of more than 50%; among them, sales of unmanned forklifts and material box robots both increased by more than 100%.

As a company that has been deeply engaged in the field of intelligent manufacturing for 8 years, HikRobot mainly focuses on warehousing and production lines, and its product categories include lurking robots, material box robots, fork-picking robots, and transfer/heavy-load robots. As of October 2022, HikRobot has currently served more than 2,500 corporate customers. Among them are well-known companies such as FAW-Volkswagen, Tongwei, Wistron, Humanwell Pharmaceuticals, SF Supply Chain, and L&S Engineers of the UK, covering multiple industries such as automobiles, lithium batteries, photovoltaics, 3C, pharmaceuticals, logistics, and e-commerce retail.

On October 18, Hikvision Robotics Smart Manufacturing Conference 2022 was grandly opened online, and simultaneously released new smart manufacturing products and industry solutions in hard technology and soft technology for 2022. In this article, Gaogong Robotics will analyze the highlights of Hikvision Robotics' new products released in 2022 and what impact and changes will it bring to the entire smart warehousing and logistics industry?

0 1

The evolution of hardware products

Based on the iBASE architecture, HikRobot has innovatively launched the lurking robots Q2 and Q7S.

Among them, Q2 has achieved many innovations compared with the previous generation of products in the same series:

First, it is more compact. Specifically, the Q2 is 170mm shorter in length, 105mm shorter in width, and 176mm shorter in rotation diameter than the previous generation Q3, making it easier to maneuver in aisles.

Second, the extremely strong load-to-weight ratio; the Q2 weighs only 93kg, but has a maximum load capacity of 500kg;

Third, it has strong carrying capacity; the Q2 has a climbing angle of 6% and a passability of 10mm on uneven roads. Whether it is light or heavy objects, small or large vehicles, it can be carried and driven easily.

Figure 1: Latent AMR Q2

As the sister model of the lurking robot Q7, the Q7S has a body height that is 22% lower than that of the Q7, reaching 200mm. Its maximum no-load speed can reach 2.3m/s and its battery life can reach 8 hours.

Figure 2: Latent AMR Q7S

While HikRobot is consolidating the foundation of its latent robot products, it is also deepening the expansion of industry applications: newly developed AMRs are suitable for high-end PCB, panel, pharmaceutical production and other fields, and meet the cleanliness requirements of Class 1,000 and Class 100; AMRs are suitable for fresh food, food, pharmaceutical circulation and other cold chain low-temperature environments, and meet the transportation requirements of different temperature ranges, and can effectively cope with low-temperature environments of minus 20 degrees Celsius.

In addition to the lurking robots, both the fork-picking robots and the bin-picking robots product lines have been upgraded.

At present, HikRobot's forklift AMR has five series, including handling, stacking, forward movement, traction, and counterweight, forming a relatively complete solution. Among them, the handling series has added a 3-ton traction-type forklift AMR; the stacking series has added a 3-ton corresponding product; the forward movement series has added a new product with a lifting height of 7.5 meters.

Figure 3: Forking an AMR

The application of material box robots has become more in-depth and the scenarios have become richer. Based on the application scenarios, multiple product series such as lifting and compounding have been expanded. At the same time, all-round improvements have been made in storage capacity utilization, efficiency, safety and other aspects.

Figure 4: Bin robot

The evolution of software systems

At this Smart Manufacturing Conference, Hikvision Robotics also upgraded its intelligent warehousing system and robot control system, and launched the new RCS-Lite lightweight robot scheduling system for small and medium-sized AMR projects.

The intelligent warehousing system iWMS V4.0 is based on business components, centered on capability opening, and based on low-code components as the engine. N industry systems are formed through 4 open components (iDataBus, iDataView, iDataClient, iDataFlow) and 3 extensible resource libraries (business algorithm library, business component library, and operation scenario library). The 4 major components are fully open in 4 aspects: system docking, management operation, operation operation, and business process. At the same time, through the process arrangement of the business component library and the algorithm library, an operation scenario library for different industries is formed, and finally an industry system that meets customer needs is formed. Let integrators and customers have the ability of secondary development, reduce system maintenance requirements, allow more people to participate in system design and function definition, and enable smart manufacturing more comprehensively.

The robot control system RCS V4.0 has undergone a major upgrade in terms of system openness. The system models the execution objects, handling objects, storage objects, etc., and opens the attributes, methods, and events of the models. Then, through the process engine TAS, various models are connected in series to form a visual configuration of the handling scene.

Figure 5: RCS V4.0 major upgrade

RCS V4.0 has three major changes compared to previous versions:

First, more flexible task orchestration: it provides a visual process orchestration engine with strong expansion capabilities and supports low-code. Users can write simple expression scripts to expand the system's new process nodes.

The second is a powerful map workstation: it provides full-process mapping guidance for LSLAM and VSLAM, provides professional prompts during the mapping process, and improves the mapping quality.

The third is the improvement of system configuration visualization capabilities: including resource configuration visualization, business process visualization, and statistical data visualization, which is conducive to improving implementation accuracy, accelerating implementation speed, and reducing configuration errors.

The RCS-Lite lightweight robot dispatching system retains the original RCS function of docking with upper-level systems and peripherals, simplifies the configuration of functional parameters, reduces hardware equipment requirements, and greatly reduces the system application threshold, enabling rapid system deployment and rapid problem troubleshooting.

Figure 6: RCS-Lite functionality

The advantages of the RCS-Lite lightweight robot scheduling system are mainly concentrated in three aspects:

First, the system is flexible and can meet the needs of small and medium-sized projects. RCS-Lite can seamlessly connect with various enterprise upper and lower systems such as WMS, MES, ERP, etc., complete the configuration of multiple task combinations of mobile robots, and provide standard interfaces for different business scenarios;

Second, the hardware requirements are low, which reduces project costs. No expensive servers are required, and deployment can be completed using industrial computers or all-in-one machines;

Third, it is easy to install and configure. It supports deployment in Windows environment and can achieve one-stop deployment.

The evolution of charging technology

From the perspective of charging technology, Hikvision Robotics has also innovatively launched the second-generation battery swap station. In addition to being able to connect to conventional charging piles for charging, it also supports manual battery replacement. Compared with the first-generation battery swap station, the second-generation battery swap station has increased efficiency by 40%, ensuring that the entire battery swap can be completed within 60 seconds; the space requirement has been reduced by 39%. At the solution level , the reliable operation of the system is ensured through the monitoring of key data such as warehouse location management software, battery pack fixture detection, temperature sensing, and smoke sensing; at the operation rhythm level , the execution path in the AMR battery swap process is further reduced, the coupling of the system is reduced, and the reliability of the long-term operation of the system is improved.