Ecovacs 2022 Fall Strategy Conference: Moving towards a broader global robotics market

At 20:00 on October 26, Beijing time, Ecovacs held its 2022 Fall Strategic New Product Launch Conference, which was launched simultaneously around the world, and for the first time presented a brand new Ecovacs to the world in both Chinese and English. At this press conference, Ecovacs CEO Qian Cheng launched the smart lawn mower robot GOAT G1 ​​in a European courtyard, and displayed the new commercial cleaning solutions DEEBOT PRO K1 and M1 at the Suzhou Museum, introducing the future of robots.

Ecovacs Robotics CEO Qian Cheng

This year, Ecovacs has gone a step further and achieved a breakthrough in the full range of scenarios for robots in life, production, and ecology. The application scenarios of these two new products have gone beyond the home, into the outdoor courtyard, and even into the commercial field. The core technological innovations of the two new products, whether it is Ecovacs's first robot vision solution or Ecovacs's full-stack self-developed robot multi-machine collaboration system HIVE, all reflect Ecovacs' grasp of the future direction of the robotics industry.

The first smart lawn mower robot launched by Ecovacs, GOAT G1, uses "robot vision" as a breakthrough to bring consumers a more convenient, efficient, beautiful and safe smart lawn mowing experience, opening the era of smart lawn mower robots 2.0. At present, the robotization rate of mowing tools in the world is only 10%, mainly because the products are not smart enough and the user experience is not good. The technical bottlenecks behind these problems are "boundary perception", "precise positioning" and "navigation and obstacle avoidance". And these basic capabilities of robots are also the technological leadership of Ecovacs. As of 2021, under the leadership and promotion of Ecovacs' innovation, the global sweeping robot market has expanded to US$6.1 billion.

If Ecovacs wants to lead the category change of lawn mowing robots, it must first define the core issues. Taking the European market as an example, users have three major pain points in using existing products - the need to manually pre-embed boundary lines, can only cut randomly or semi-planned, and often get stuck and collide, injuring people and objects. GOAT G1 ​​solves these problems with robot vision. Ecovacs first released the TrueMapng quadruple fusion positioning system. Its core technological innovation is a robot binocular vision solution composed of a 360-degree panoramic camera and a fisheye camera, which can achieve "centimeter-level" precise positioning in courtyard spaces with unclear physical boundaries and undulating ground. The system also integrates UWB ultra-wideband wireless carrier communication technology, inertial navigation technology and GPS positioning technology to make GOAT's positioning performance more stable.

GOAT G1's robot vision technology solves the cumbersome boundary line deployment problem, and can also achieve logical cutting and navigation obstacle avoidance. When using it for the first time, the user only needs to remotely control G1 to walk around the courtyard, and the boundary setting and map creation of a standard courtyard can be completed in less than half an hour. This also greatly improves the efficiency and effect of cutting, allowing GOAT G1 ​​to complete 600 square meters of lawn cutting in a day, making the courtyard more neat and beautiful. With the support of the VI 3D solution composed of vision and ToF sensors, GOAT G1 ​​can autonomously identify common obstacles in the courtyard, so as not to hurt people or objects, and has a higher safety factor. In addition, GOAT G1 ​​is also a courtyard security butler robot.

These capabilities of GOAT coincide with the characteristics of "precise, powerful and smart" of the Ecovacs lawn mower robot product spokesperson, Mr. Michael Ballack, three-time German Footballer of the Year and former captain of the German national team.

Michael Barak, spokesperson for Ecovacs Robotic Mower

Ecovacs' new professional solution for commercial scenarios: DEEBOT PRO

The DEEBOT PRO launched today by Ecovacs, nicknamed "Professional Edition DEEBOT", is an unprecedented commercial cleaning combination solution. Its core breakthroughs include multi-product combination, multi-robot efficient collaborative system and business model innovation. It aims to create a practical, easy-to-use and affordable smart commercial cleaning experience for customers, making it possible for robots to serve everyone.

DEEBOT PRO includes two robots, K1 and M1, one small and one large, which can be combined in various quantities to meet the complex floor cleaning needs in small, medium and large commercial environments. DEEBOT PRO is also equipped with HIVE (Homogeneous ligence Variable Execuon), the first robot multi-machine collaborative system pioneered by Ecovacs, so that multiple robots can have a shared "strongest brain" to achieve autonomous sharing of infrastructure, intercommunication of environment and location information, as well as autonomous scheduling and collaborative cleaning operations. DEEBOT PRO adopted a full rental business model for the first time to reduce the user's usage costs. The first Ecovacs robot rental platform was officially launched today. In the first quarter of next year, DEEBOT PRO will officially enter various commercial spaces.

Ecovacs Commercial Cleaning Robot DEEBOT PRO K1, M1

Ecovacs believes that the future of robots lies in collaboration, so it has developed a full-stack HIVE system. Ecovacs' own brand Krjian's high-precision laser radar is the basis for the HIVE system to be applied on DEEBOT PRO. K1 and M1 are equipped with Krjian's high-precision laser radar of the same model, height and viewing angle. After any robot completes the construction of the environmental map, all maps and location information will be automatically synchronized to the HIVE system first, and then distributed to all collaborative robots. I believe that the future application of the robot collaboration ecosystem pioneered by Ecovacs will go far beyond this, and the potential is unlimited.

For 25 years, Ecovacs has always been demand-oriented in its R&D and innovation, and has continuously defined the service robot industry. The newly released smart lawn mower robot GOAT G1 ​​and commercial cleaning robot solution DEEBOT PRO both reflect Ecovacs Robotics' original intention to always start from user pain points and solve problems through technological innovation. Ecovacs' layout extends from life scenarios to production scenarios and a wider robot ecosystem, relying on the brand's repeated breakthroughs in core components such as chips, sensors, and continuous innovation in underlying capabilities such as positioning, navigation, obstacle avoidance, cleaning, AI, and algorithms.

Ecovacs believes that the future development direction of robots is collaboration, so it continues to make arrangements in this regard. Last year, Ecovacs released the YIKO intelligent voice assistant, which opened up a new interactive mode of human-machine collaboration in the service robot industry; this year, Ecovacs released the robot multi-machine collaboration system HIVE, which realized the interconnection between robots and brought more possibilities to the development of robots.

Article reprinted from: Sina Technology