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Produced by Huxiu Technology Group

Author | Wang Xin

Editor | Miao Zhengqing

Header image | Visual China

“In fact, our company only has one benchmark company—Tesla。”

On the eve of the launch conference on August 18, Zhiyuan Robotics partner Jiang Qingsong described their route vision to Huxiu.Humanoid RobotOptimus Prime was initially used in factories, which is also the scenario that Zhiyuan focuses on. Jiang Qingsong believes that the market space for industrial scenarios is the largest, and the difficulty of entry is also the greatest. Zhiyuan's commercial scenarios are delivery service scenarios such as showrooms and 4S stores, and 3C,semiconductorThe main application scenarios are in manufacturing factories and the estimated shipment volume this year is about 300 units (200 two-legged units and 100 wheeled units).

In addition, like Tesla, Zhiyuan Robotics also chose the data-driven route.

However, there are also some voices in the industry who think that there is no need to regard Tesla's products as the standard. After all, the commercialization plan of Tesla Optimus Prime has been delayed to 2026.

Tesla's superior resources can support the slow commercialization of humanoid robots, while Zhiyuan Robotics needs to directly enter the commercial stage and achieve some commercialization in a short period of time before it can support specific research and development. Therefore, Zhiyuan Robotics will have many intermediate products that meet commercial scenarios, and then slowly move towards a higher goal - entering the home scenario.

This route of commercialization by picking "low-hanging fruits" is adopted by many domesticEmbodied IntelligenceHowever, Zhiyuan Robotics, currently valued at 7 billion, is already one of the companies that has received the most hot money in the field of embodied intelligence.

Zhiyuan Robotics is a star company in the embodied intelligence track and is also aLarge ModelOne of the "New Four Little Dragons" of embodied intelligence that has emerged under the wave. Co-founder "Zhihuijun" Peng Zhihui is a 90s generation.Huawei"Genius boy", he has 2.58 million fans on Bilibili. In February 2023, Zhihuijun partnered with Yan Weixin, a professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to officially establish Zhiyuan Robotics in Shanghai. The company currently has nearly 350 employees.

After launching the first generation of robot Zhiyuan Yuanzheng A1, Zhiyuan Robot received multiple rounds of financing, including angel round, A round, A1 round, A1+ round, A2 round, A3 round, A4 round, etc., with a pre-investment valuation of 7 billion yuan, including Hillhouse, Matrix Partners, CDH Investments, Gaorong, BlueRun, Sequoia China and other leading institutions.BYD, SAIC Venture Capital,BaiduVenture capital and other industrial capital, and plans to launch a new round of Series B financing early next year.

On August 18, Peng Zhihui, co-founder of Zhiyuan Robotics, presided over and released five new commercial humanoid robots in the two major series of "Yuanzheng" and "Lingxi" - Yuanzheng A2, Yuanzheng A2-W, Yuanzheng A2-Max, Lingxi X1 and Lingxi X1-W. He also demonstrated the independent research and development results in the four major fields of robot power, perception, communication, and control, as well as the embodied intelligence G1 to G5 technology roadmap and the AIDEA embodied intelligence data system.

At the press conference, Zhiyuan Robotics announced its open source plan, including: AimRT, a high-performance communication framework for intelligent robots, will be open source at the end of September, Lingxi X1, incubated by X-Lab, will be fully open sourced in September, and it was announced that one million real machine and ten million simulation data sets based on AIDEA will be open sourced in the fourth quarter of this year.

All inHumanoid Robots

Jiang Qingsong told Huxiu that the company focuses on general humanoid robots. Among the five new robots released, two wheeled humanoid robots are more needed by factories. They believe that although bipedal robots are the ultimate form of robots, there are more limitations - such as reliability and power consumption. But what factories need now is a form that can complete the process - the wheeled upper body is humanoid, capable of performing dual-arm coordination, and the addition of some brain technology can basically solve some generalized scenario problems in factories.

Legged robots are mostly used in marketing customer service, interactive service scenarios and other scenarios.

In addition to humanoid robots, in March of this year, Zhiyuan Robotics also released a commercial cleaning robot. At that time, they were considering building sales channels through commercial products. In addition, the chassis slam technology of these two products can be interoperable, mainly targeting factory use scenarios, and there is also overlap in customers.

At present, Zhiyuan Robotics' factory in Lingang, Shanghai, has entered the final preparation stage for mass production. It is expected to start production in October and reach one million in November. Jiang Qingsong revealed to Huxiu that the domestic production rate of hardware is very high, and almost all hardware is purchased domestically.

In terms of cost, a general humanoid robot, which is basically about 1.7 meters tall, has a difficult manufacturing process and costs about 250,000 to 300,000 yuan, and its market price is around 600,000 to 700,000 yuan.

As for the smaller robots of about 1.3 meters, they are easy to manufacture and have lower costs because of their low center of gravity. However, Jiang Qingsong told Huxiu that "we will not engage in a price war, but will open source the robots and provide parts so that technology experts and geeks can quickly master the technology of humanoid robots."

Therefore, this time, Zhiyuan Robotics released a full-stack open source robot - Lingxi X1. Their ultimate ideal is to realize "humanoid robots created by everyone" through open source.

Open source, breaking down data barriers

The current pain points of embodied intelligence are the lack of data and high cost. According to statistics, there are 15T of text data, 6B of pictures, and 2.6B of videos, but the embodied intelligence data is only 2.4M.

Based on this, Zhiyuan Robotics proposed a full-process embodied data solution - AIDEA. Millions of real machine and tens of millions of simulation data sets based on AIDEA will be open sourced in the fourth quarter of this year.

Jiang Qingsong revealed to Huxiu that Zhiyuan Robotics has just built a training plant with a scale of about 30 units, and it is expected that by the end of September, a collection plant with a scale of about 100 units will be built. Next, it will enter a stage of data mass production. The cost of real machine data is relatively high, but the efficiency is very high. About 6,000 real machine data can train an action into a more generalized effect; although the cost of simulation data is low, the effect is only 60% to 70% of the real machine data.

Regarding the current embodied intelligence market structure, Jiang Qingsong believes that the industry is still in a stage where track selection is greater than competition. There are not many players like Zhiyuan Robotics who bet on the industrial scene track. This is because the industrial market space is the largest, but the difficulty of entry is also the greatest.

Zhiyuan Robot summarizes the current industrial scene applications as "PPT" (short for pick place and transfer). Industrial scenes require good generalization capabilities. This year, Zhiyuan Robot has proved the feasibility of this direction through some breakthroughs, such as loading and unloading of parts and battery plug-in scenes. These scenes also enable Zhiyuan Robot to meet the manufacturing needs of the 3C semiconductor industry.

Jiang Qingsong believes that robots entering factories do not replace blue-collar workers, but rather improve production efficiency. They play a more complementary role in production, and some new positions will also be created, such as data collectors, trainers, and researchers.

Although in traditional factory scenes,Robotic ArmApplication is still the mainstream choice, but Zhiyuan Robot believes that it still has many shortcomings. The key to humanoid robot technology is the development of brain technology, achieving full-body coordination through multimodal perception, and integrating the brain into the robotic arm, so that certain generalized products can be truly realized. This is also the opportunity for humanoid robots such as Zhiyuan.