Digging deep into the past and future of AGV, and how small and medium-sized manufacturers can carve out a "bloody path" in the internal competition

With the rise of smart manufacturing around the world, the logistics industry has also ushered in intelligence. Among them, AGV and RGV play a key role in the automated logistics system.

AGV refers to an automated guided vehicle, which is a transport vehicle equipped with an automatic guidance device such as an electromagnetic or optical device, capable of traveling along a prescribed guidance path, and having safety protection and various transfer functions.

At present, AGV has been widely used in the logistics industry, which can not only improve the efficiency of production and transportation, but also reduce the cost of production and transportation. It has even become one of the iconic configurations of modern smart factories.

The world's first AGV was born in 1953.

Originally, it was a converted tractor with a hood that transported goods along overhead wires in a grocery warehouse.

This original form of AGV dominated the market in the late 1950s and early 1960s , and developed into various types of traction AGVs, which came to prominence in factories and warehouses.

Twenty years later, in 1973, the Volvo assembly plant in Kalmar, Sweden, began to develop asynchronous equipment assembly lines to replace traditional conveyor belt assembly lines. By then, the number of computer-controlled assembly AGVs had reached 280.

The first major development period of the AGV industry was in the mid-1970s, when the first load-carrying AGV was born .

These load-carrying AGVs are widely accepted because they can provide multifunctional services in the field of material handling, such as workstations in factories, conveying equipment, and connections between control systems and information systems.

Therefore, the AGV system at this time has been widely used in warehouses, factories, workshops, hospitals and other industrial and commercial fields.

At that time, the basic guidance technology was based on sensing the electromagnetic frequency generated by the wire buried underground. A device called a "ground controller" turned the frequency in the wire on or off, thus guiding the AGV to travel along a predetermined path.

Since AGVs simply follow signals on the ground, they are called "dumb", and the path the AGV travels is determined by an intelligent ground controller, so the systems of this period are called "smart ground" and "dumb cars".

But the disadvantages are also obvious. Because the sensor on the AGV will select an electromagnetic signal of a certain frequency to provide guidance for the AGV according to the strength of the signal, grooves need to be cut on the ground along the path that the AGV travels, and at the bends, the groove track must conform to the turning radius of the AGV. This makes the installation cost of the navigation circuit very expensive.

In the late 1980s, wireless guidance technology was introduced into the AGV system , such as the use of laser and inertial guidance. This improved the flexibility and accuracy of the AGV system, and when the path needed to be modified, there was no need to change the ground or interrupt production.

Later, with the rapid development of high-tech products such as electronic products and computer software, the computers in the AGV system are used to store instructions, make judgments, and execute programs. Subsequently, the application of AGV has rapidly developed from the initial traditional directional distribution to the field of automobile assembly lines with robot interfaces and complex computer control. With the growth of market demand for AGV , the growth of AGV manufacturers has also become geometric. For example, since the late 1970s, there have been less than 6 AGV manufacturers in the United States, and there are only 3 types of AGV. By 1990, there were more than 40 AGV manufacturers in the world, and more than 15 types of models.

According to public information data, the current eight major heavy-load AGV manufacturers abroad are: Germany's Gottwald, New Zealand's Scott Technology, DTA, Switzerland's Esatroll SA, ROFA, AVT Europe NV, Italy's MORELLO, and the United States' AGVE.

Today, AGV has penetrated into the manufacturing industry, special industries, catering services, food and medicine industries, etc., taking on tasks such as handling, loading and unloading, and pallet delivery, greatly saving human capital.

The research and application of AGV in my country started relatively late.

The first three-wheeled AGV in China was born in the late 1970s at the Beijing Institute of Hoisting and Conveying Machinery.

10年之后，北京机械工业自动化研究所为二汽研制了应用在立体化仓库中的AGV，沈阳自动化研究所为金杯汽车公司研制了汽车发动机装配用的AGV。

In the 1990s, the National CIMS Engineering Center of Tsinghua University successfully applied AGVs imported from abroad to the experimental research of EIMS; the Department of Computer Technology Applications of Tsinghua University developed AGVs for postal centers; the Kunming Ship Equipment Research Institute developed laser-guided AGVs; and the Intelligent Vehicle Research Group of Jilin University of Technology developed vision-guided AGVs for automobile assembly lines.

It was not until 2015 that the number of Chinese AGV players increased rapidly , capital began to flow in, and leading companies rose rapidly. Major representative manufacturers such as Hikvision Robotics, Geek+, Muxing Intelligence, Jiazhi Technology, Standard Robotics, UAI, and BlueCore Technology grew rapidly. Some small and medium-sized manufacturers also gained favor at major exhibitions with their high recognition rate and low maintenance cost of AGVs.

Since then, with the development of e-commerce logistics, more and more e-commerce companies, retail enterprises, and express delivery companies have begun to introduce warehouse robots, such as Cainiao, Tmall, Vipshop, Amazon, JD.com, Suning, SF Express, and STO Express.

Subsequently, the market demand for AGV robots saw a rapid increase.

Today, after the rapid development of the track in recent years, the outline of the domestic AGV market has initially emerged, and the advantages of the head players are continuously expanding. At the same time, they have begun to expand horizontally in product matrix and application scenarios .

According to statistics from Gaogong Robot Industry Research Institute (GGII), there are more than 200 AGV companies in China, most of which are below RMB 50 million. The market share of leading manufacturers represented by Hikvision Robotics and Geek+ is increasing year by year, and their comprehensive advantages are continuously expanding. At the same time, new manufacturers are also growing rapidly through innovative and differentiated product strategies.

GGII predicts that by 2026, the sales volume of China's mobile robot (AGV) market will exceed 350,000 units, with a compound growth rate of more than 40%. By 2026, the market size will exceed 37 billion yuan.

In addition, the AGV industry has frequently gone overseas and appeared at major robot exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and the development of domestic AGVs has shown a trend of catching up.

Some industry experts even claim that the development of mobile robots in China is now among the best in the world.

At present, the AGV industry is in a state of rapid growth. Although some leading companies have emerged on the world stage, due to the high degree of professionalism of AGV, more small and medium-sized AGV manufacturers are facing various difficulties that restrict their development.

According to the summary of Gaogong Mobile Robot, it can be summarized into the following four points:

First, some small and medium-sized AGV manufacturers blindly followed the trend and did not invest more energy in breakthroughs in core technologies that were of great importance. They were strictly assemblers rather than creators. Although they have introduced a lot of advanced technologies, they cannot rely on their own strong scientific research teams to make further openings. In the long run, products without obvious personality will find it difficult to gain a foothold in the already involuted market.

Secondly, an enterprise that does not have its own core professional and technical personnel and only wants to take shortcuts and achieve leapfrog development by piecing together various means may be able to do so in the short term, but over time, its R&D system will show its inadequacies, putting the enterprise into a vicious cycle.

Third, on the technical level, core components currently rely mainly on foreign products, such as drive controllers, systems, and automatic navigation sensors. The domestic supply chain is in a relatively weak period. According to the principle of big fish eat small fish, small and medium-sized manufacturers will also be at a disadvantage in procurement competition, thus restricting the development of the company.

Fourthly, due to the lack of innovative spirit, product homogeneity is serious and they can only rely on "changing the shell and launching new products" to maintain development. The enthusiasm of enterprises will also be frustrated. The idea of ​​seizing the market through "price war" will also become difficult to implement because there is no cost advantage.

In short, China's AGV market is gradually becoming clear, and many fields have begun to use technology to achieve logistics automation. Due to China's huge market base, some well-known foreign AGV manufacturers have turned their attention to the Chinese market and adopted various means to occupy the Chinese market. It can be foreseen that the competition in the AGV market will become more intense. Only by breaking through the above four bottlenecks and developing products with unique competitiveness can small and medium-sized AGV manufacturers open up a way in the internal circulation and get a share of the AGV market.