Exclusive interview with Yuanluobo President Ma Kun: The difficulty in creating new categories of robot products is to find rigid demand
2024-08-25
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Beijing News Shell Financial reporter interviews SenseTime co-founder and Yuanluobo president Ma Kun. Photo by Beijing News Shell Financial reporter Ji Zhe
From August 21 to 25, the 2024 World Robot Conference was held in Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone. Among the many robots that "competed to show off" cutting-edge technology, many robot products have been put into use and have withstood the test of the market, such as the Yuanluobo AI chess robot series, which ranked first in sales in the "intelligent robot category" during the Double Eleven promotion for two consecutive years.
As a brand of SenseTime, the previous series of robots mainly include chess and go. At this World Robot Conference, it launched Yuanluobo AI chess-playing robot - Chess Professional Edition, which obviously sets its sights on overseas.
How did the Yuanluobo series of robots start from scratch and turn an AI robot into a hot-selling product? Beijing News Shell Finance reporter interviewed Ma Kun, co-founder of SenseTime and president of Yuanluobo, at the World Robot Conference.
Why did AI companies “transform from B to C” and enter the market by starting with chess-playing robots?
It should be pointed out that when Yuanluobo's first chess robot was launched in August 2022, there were no products of this category on the market at that time. As an artificial intelligence company, SenseTime's previous business was mainly focused on the B-end and G-end. The first launch of a physical C-end robot product for the family was a bold attempt for SenseTime at the time.
"SenseTime has made a lot of contributions in the areas of smart cities, but these may not be felt by ordinary users. We think it is very meaningful for artificial intelligence to enter the home. After AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in 2017, the public has fully understood the power of artificial intelligence, but AlphaGo can only run on supercomputers, which is still out of reach for ordinary people. Therefore, we thought of making a small, cheap, and fully automatic robot so that families can use it." Ma Kun said in an interview with the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter, "Yuanluobo's positioning is to become an artificial intelligence company that enters the home. We must land to truly obtain first-hand data closed loop."
He said that with this original intention, the Yuanluobo chess-playing robot adopted the idea of using AI to replace high-cost components from the very beginning of product design, that is, to exceed expectations while the cost should not be too high. "I didn't expect that after the product was launched on the market, it was really loved by children. When participating in exhibitions, there were a lot of children surrounding it, and even playing chess in offline Sam's Club. The sales colleagues told me that we once again achieved breakthrough results in this year's 618 Shopping Festival, with sales and GMV increasing by more than 200% year-on-year, so it has indeed been recognized by consumers."
Visitors to the exhibition and Yuanluobo Go robot playing against each other. Image provided by the official website of the Robot Conference
Ma Kun told the Shell Finance reporter that the consumers of chess and Go are mainly domestic. Later, it was discovered that Go culture is also widely accepted in East Asian countries such as Japan. The Yuanluobo Go robot also sells well in Japan. The other party said that "other products cannot achieve such low cost and such good performance." The chess robot launched this time has a high acceptance in Western culture and will further go abroad and enter the overseas market.
The development of AI technology has given Yuanluobo series products the possibility of innovation
Specifically, compared with chess and go, Yuanluobo's chess robot has undergone a "technical upgrade" because chess uses three-dimensional chess pieces, and the shapes of the chess pieces are unique, with different heights and overlapping light and shadow. This makes it very difficult for the robot to grasp and identify the chess pieces. In addition, the chess robot needs to accurately identify the shapes of different chess pieces, and also needs to avoid problems such as mutual occlusion between chess pieces and misidentification and missed identification under complex lighting.
In response to this, Yuanluobo set up four degrees of freedom for the robotic arm, forming a flexible structure with four degrees of freedom of shoulder, elbow, forearm and claw. It also introduced a mechanical claw on a household robot for the first time, achieving vertical grasping operation with 0.5mm accuracy and stability. Shell Finance reporters saw at the exhibition that the grasping force can pick up quail eggs without breaking them.
In Ma Kun's view, the development of AI technology is the reason why new categories of robot products can be implemented at a reasonable cost. "We want people to feel that this thing is affordable and willing to use it, so we must shrink the complex algorithm through the method of distillation and put it into an embedded AI chip. The power consumption of this chip is only 3 watts, which is much lower than the power consumed by AlphaGo in the previous competition."
He told reporters that with this kind of technology upgrade, playing for an hour a day might only cost one or two cents in electricity, so everyone would dare to use it. In this process, how to optimize, tailor, and distill a large, high-performance algorithm to an embedded, low-power small device requires a lot of algorithmic and engineering work, and this is what we are willing to invest in.
"In the future, the implementation of robots will require breakthroughs in many other areas, such as materials, energy, and engineering. They must be able to solve a landing scenario and then be implemented in that scenario with the best cost-effectiveness. By using the data obtained, robot products can develop better. Just like Tesla, the goal is to make a civilian product that enters thousands of households. The more people use it, the more data is collected, and the resulting autonomous driving capabilities will become better and better. For the entire robot product, I also hope to develop in this direction." Ma Kun said.
Beijing News Shell Financial Reporter Luo Yidan Editor Wang Jinyu Proofreading Lu Qian
