AI voice unicorn Yunzhisheng hit the sci-tech innovation board, and its core-making power and market planning power attracted attention

 Not long ago, Yunzhisheng formally submitted the IPO prospectus materials to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and entered the inquiry stage smoothly.

In the summer of 2012, in the domestic speech recognition circle, the news of Huang Wei "going away" to start a business spread like wildfire. As a technically capable person in the field of speech recognition, Huang Wei previously served as a senior researcher at Motorola for a long time, helping the company launch the world's first voiceprint recognition mobile phone; later, he served as a core executive of the Shanda Innovation Institute, and established a reputation for a while The voice branch.

Gao Guang's resume, Huang Wei's "where" undoubtedly aroused the attention of the industry. It didn't take long for a speech recognition company named "Yunzhisheng" to be formally registered.

In Huang Wei's own words, even though he has made a lot of achievements in the field of voice, when Yunzhisheng was just established, the company's specific direction was not completely determined, but it only saw the rapid development of mobile devices. However, what he never doubted is that in the future smart devices, "sound" will definitely become a very important way of interaction, which is promising in various business scenarios.

Slogans like "18 months is the time window" and "6 months is the line of life and death for startups" are not unfamiliar to the slightly "impetuous" technology startup circle. In contrast, there are very few companies that truly rely on innovative technologies and continue to invest in various business application scenarios. At the moment, Yun Zhisheng has quietly passed his eighth birthday and has become an important player in the AI ​​voice segmentation industry.

Starting from the voice recognition track, to providing a complete intelligent voice solution, accompanied by the start of core manufacturing, the "cloud-end-core" product strategy...In the past eight years, Yunzhisheng’s technical, engineering and industrial capabilities have Continue to mature. Yunzhisheng has grown into an AI voice company with "full stack" capabilities. At this time, it may be the right time for Yun Zhisheng to exert his strength to the next target and sprint into the capital market.

Not long ago, Yunzhisheng formally submitted the IPO prospectus materials to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and entered the inquiry stage smoothly. In this regard, the industry has heatedly said that "the first AI voice on the Sci-tech Innovation Board" may be born soon. Under the public's expectations, where is Yunzhisheng's hard power in technology? How high is the commercial moat of the enterprise? With the blessing of capital, what changes will Yunzhisheng's future development have?

Eight years of AI voice accumulation from unicorn to impact on science and technology innovation board

In the 1980s, the American futurist Alvin Toffler’s scientific and technological masterpiece "The Third Wave" was officially published. The book boldly predicted the digital age with computers and digital technology as the core driving force, and set off the scientific and technological circles Optimistic expectations of the "information society".

Passion is put into practice, and the future has arrived. After 2010, the digital economy has grown rapidly, and the world has officially entered the mobile Internet era. Among them, the new infrastructure revolution represented by 5G and artificial intelligence has become the most important source of power in the digital economy.

It is worth noting that during this period, not only were there a wide variety of networked devices, but also the networking scenes continued to produce new breakthroughs. Users can access the network through common hardware such as mobile phones and computers, and all kinds of home appliances, home appliances, and even medical and automotive hardware can be transformed into network interfaces to enrich the business scenarios of networking.

In this context, AI vision and voice tracks were born and gradually became an important part of the domestic artificial intelligence market. Compared with images, the voice interaction process and interaction logic are more complex, which also determines the complexity and difficulty of commercial application of its products, and users have higher expectations for product performance. On the other hand, the image also has a more fixed scene application than the voice track. Therefore, the commercial realization of the image field is more stable.

There is a voice on the market saying that for voice companies, survival means more testing the team's ability to "market planning". At this level, Yunzhisheng's technological accumulation and commercial application path may be worthy of reference by the industry.

In terms of intelligent voice interaction products, Yunzhisheng can currently provide cross-hardware platforms, cross-application scenarios, and cloud-core integrated IoT voice interaction products. At the same time, it can also face industry-level customers, covering "perception", "cognition", "Decisions" and other different levels of intelligent voice tool products. In the field of smart IoT solutions, the company mainly provides integrated smart IoT solutions for specific scenarios such as hotels, communities, residences, and hospitals, helping many enterprise-level customers to achieve interconnection between users and devices, and between devices and devices. interactive.

Regarding the development logic of Yunzhisheng in the AI ​​voice track, Huang Wei concluded, “Because we are at the forefront of the industry, not in the research room, we know what our customers need better. If this technology is to meet the needs of scenarios, What must we do."

Two minority choices to upgrade business liquidity

After the precise positioning of the track, the sustainable realization of the company also requires strong innovation capabilities. In this regard, Yun Zhisheng's two technical choices must be mentioned. Among them, the first introduction of DNN in 2012 can be regarded as Yun Zhisheng's first "minority" attempt.

The so-called DNN refers to the "deep neural network algorithm", which can successfully increase the previous speech recognition rate significantly. It has been a popular topic in the field of machine learning in the industry and academia in recent years. However, the verification of model correctness is complicated and requires more time and money to test, which is also the main feature of DNN.

For Yun Zhisheng, who had just entered the initial stage of entrepreneurship, the cost of trial and error for the enterprise can be imagined. But at this moment, Huang Wei still made the decision to enable DNN. In his view, with the increase in computing power and the expansion of the sample database, DNN is the most effective way to improve AI "IQ", and higher costs also mean higher and faster returns.

In the later commercial practice, Yun Zhisheng's technical prediction was also proved to be correct and efficient. After choosing DNN, the speech recognition accuracy rate of Yunzhisheng products has been greatly improved, and soon reached the standard for commercial use. From the current choices of most companies, DNN has also become a mainstream choice.

The second minority choice of Yunzhisheng is reflected in its layout of artificial intelligence voice chips. But compared to choosing the DNN algorithm, Yunzhisheng's "core-making" road has experienced greater doubts.

Since all core artificial intelligence technologies are computationally intensive, they have a rigid demand for hardware computing power. While providing sufficient computing power, the edge-side chips of the Internet of Things also need to consider functions, power consumption, cost, Many factors such as reliability. Therefore, without the ability to provide sufficient computing power from the end-side and the relatively cheap underlying hardware support, it will be difficult for the company to have the best cloud-side intelligent solutions, and there is no way to talk about rich commercial returns.

As Huang Wei said, "Not making a chip is a dead end." This is not a question of good or better, but a question of "to be or not to be". If you think this thing must be done, then just do it.

Despite the controversy, it seems that this time the core-making decision has become an important reason why Yunzhisheng is different from other AI voice companies and shapes the technological moat.

Public information shows that since 2015, Yunzhisheng has started to deploy artificial intelligence voice chips and began to develop uDSP processors and DeepNet IP technology. On this basis, it was the first to deliver artificial intelligence voice chips-"Swift" in 2018. In 2019, we will successively launch the car-grade chip "Snow Leopard" and the second upgraded version of the chip "Hummingbird" series for the home furnishing field, and start the research and development of the chip "Dolphin" with "image + voice" multi-modal interaction function, continuing to lead Same industry...

According to the prospectus disclosed by Yunzhisheng, the company's operating income in 2018 has increased by three times compared with 2017, and its main sources are reflected in the chip and hardware fields. And if it does not personally get involved in chip manufacturing, Yunzhisheng may not be able to empower the industry on a large scale and at low cost, and it will not be able to truly step into the small circle of technology and enter the large circle of industry.

Summarizing the company’s development past, if we want to characterize every “minority choice” of Yunzhisheng, perhaps it is — always stand from the perspective of practical problem solving, stand on the height of user experience, stand on the actual solution to user needs Direction.

Multiple business application scenarios, expecting capital to be empowered

With the blessing of its own chips, Yunzhisheng has rapidly strengthened its ability to commercialize the technology. In specific commercial applications, the company has successfully developed two series of intelligent voice interactive products and intelligent IoT solutions, and has gained widespread recognition in the home and medical fields.

In residential and hotel scenarios, Yunzhisheng uses air-conditioning voice modules as a breakthrough, and through in-depth cooperation with leading home appliance companies such as Gree, it has expanded and formed an IoT voice interaction product series covering dozens of IoT devices. , The company further upgraded its single product to a comprehensive solution, and delivered it to hotels, communities and other scenarios.

In addition, it has also established a joint venture with Shimao Group to deliver smart IoT solutions in batches to many hotels under Shimao Group, bringing rapid growth in sales revenue to the company.

In the hospital scenario, in 2016, Yunzhisheng cooperated with Peking Union Medical College Hospital to take the lead in implementing medical record transfer solutions in China, and it was quickly promoted in the industry. It has been used in more than 100 hospitals and more than 500 Home hospitals are used in testing. In addition, Yunzhisheng has also built a large-scale medical knowledge map based on the needs of smart medical care, and launched medical record quality control systems, smart follow-up products based on this, and built and improved medical smart IoT solutions to expand its influence in the hospital scene .

Focusing on the fundraising project of Yunzhisheng preparing for the Science and Technology Innovation Board this time, it once again reflects the company's continuous and in-depth development goals for technical capabilities, engineering capabilities, and industrial capabilities.

According to the prospectus, Yunzhisheng intends to issue no more than 20.25 million shares and plans to raise about 912 million yuan for use in artificial intelligence technology mid-stage construction projects, artificial intelligence chip research and development platform construction projects for edge computing of the Internet of things, and artificial intelligence Technical smart hospital solution construction project and supplementary working capital.

In addition to the capital blessing, the favorable policies seem to foretell Yunzhisheng's future development opportunities. In the "Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and Long-Term Goals for 2035" recently released, expressions such as "Science and Technology Self-reliance as a Strategic Support for National Development" have once again triggered the industry Hot discussion. In addition, the "recommendation" also pointed out that it is necessary to target frontier fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, and brain science, and implement a batch of forward-looking and strategic national major scientific and technological projects.

Some insiders commented that technology, engineering, and industry are compounded, which together constitute Yunzhisheng's AI full-stack capabilities. It is not difficult to imagine that if it successfully enters the capital market, Yunzhisheng will continue to maintain its technology and application leadership, further consolidate its core competitiveness, and promote the further development of the domestic AI voice track.

Help the machine install eyes, "Dingna Automation" completed the B round of 100 million yuan financing

 Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions.

Machine vision is an important front branch of the artificial intelligence industry. Machine vision gives machines the ability to "see" and "cognize" by simulating the human visual system, which is the basis for machines to understand the world.

The global machine vision market has been growing steadily since 2015 and is expected to reach US$25 billion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 22.1%. China's machine vision market has entered a stage of rapid development since 2015 , with a compound growth rate of 24.9% from 2015 to 2022, which is higher than the global level.

Suzhou Dingna Automation is a company that can provide machine vision inspection solutions for manufacturing customers . Recently, Dingna completed a 100 million yuan B round of financing jointly invested by Source Code Capital, Yuanhai Minghua, and Xiaomiao Capital . The Series B financing will be used to expand production capacity, meet customer needs, introduce high-end experts and talents, develop new products, and maintain the competitiveness of technologies and products.

Dingna was established in 2010. The company is committed to 3D vision ultra-high-precision measurement technology, deep learning complex defect detection technology, artificial intelligence object recognition technology and robot vision intelligent grasping technology, and launches a comprehensive software and hardware integration Automatic intelligent manufacturing equipment currently covers subdivision scenarios such as 3C, automobiles, 5G, display panels, and semiconductors.

"So far, Dingna has 10 years of experience in the industry. The past 10 years can be divided into three stages. From 2010 to 2017, we are mainly doing machine vision system modules , and we have been exposed to nearly a thousand application scenarios ; from 2017 -In 2019, we made an overall solution based on visual inspection; in 2020, some of our projects will begin mass production, and most of our target customers are from the 3C industry.” said Dingna CEO Qin Yinghua.

Qin Yinghua recalled that the cooperation between Dingna and US consumer electronics giants began in 2013, but initially focused on "indirect cooperation". " We provide vision systems to third-party equipment integrators, and then they provide them to each other as a whole." Since 2017, Dingna has become a direct partner of each other.

"We are facing the quality system of the other side's entire parts supply chain, such as glass, metal parts, plastic parts, etc. We have to conduct quality inspections for the production links of these parts." Qin Yinghua said.

Qin Yinghua compared Dingna's attempts in the 3C field in the first few years to "from 1 to 99", but now it is "from 99 to 99.99". "The step from 99 to 99.99 looks relatively small, but it is the most difficult step. Because 1-99 is mainly iterative, there may be no way to achieve mass landing, and a small number of machines need to be put into the customer’s production line. Verify whether the technology is stable and reliable." Qin Yinghua said. "But the last step from 99 to 99.99 means that a large number of equipment will be launched for mass production."

Qin Yinghua said that the entire process needs to systematically optimize and iterate on equipment hardware and software algorithms. What customers need is a stable and reliable equipment that has been repeatedly tempered, not a single industrial camera or a piece of the latest algorithm code.

In the first 7 years of the company's establishment, Dingna completed the accumulation from 1 to 99. "We have done many projects in non-3C industries and have accumulated rich experience in many industries. However, it is not easy to gain the trust of customers at the top of the pyramid . It took Dingna a full 3 years. From our indirect service to the customer, Established contact with them and upgraded to a "direct partner", one is because the technology has been recognized by the other party, and the other is because we insist on being customer-centric and can quickly respond to the other party's requirements and meet customer needs."

"The other party was worried that our company's volume was too small and the risk was not easy to control, so initially we only cooperated on small projects, such as visual inspection related to smart watch parts." Qin Yinghua said that Dingna successfully completed the task. Gaining the trust of each other, while the company expanded in a planned way, the ability to undertake projects was stronger, and the two parties gradually began to dock tasks related to smartphone parts.

Qin Yinghua said that in the past two years, the American technology giant has consciously cultivated its domestic supply chain. At the same time, as a whole, the market size of machine vision inspection equipment in the field of consumer electronics and related display panels, chip manufacturing and other core components will be close to 3 billion yuan in 2019, and will reach nearly 4 billion in 2020. Consumer electronic products have a short life cycle and a large demand, so in the next few years it will drive the rapid growth of machine vision market demand.

According to Qin Yinghua's plan, Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions, and the long-term goal is to establish a firm foothold in the consumer electronics field and penetrate into display panels, automobiles and other fields in the future. Currently, Dingna has self-developed standardized modules and productizable solutions in the process of serving customers across industries.

In terms of team, Dingna has a professional team of 300 people, mainly technical R&D personnel. Dingna Automation invests 15% of its revenue in research and development every year. The company already has more than 80 patents and software copyrights. At present, the company has branches in Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Silicon Valley in the United States, and is accelerating the layout of its R&D headquarters in Suzhou Park.

Artificial intelligence can only "optimize", while humans can "evolve"

 

Consciousness is the function of the human brain

Editor's note: Artificial intelligence is booming under the feed of massive amounts of data, but is it truly intelligent? The author of this article Douglas Rushkoff believes that artificial intelligence is not. Although artificial intelligence is superior to the human brain in computing and other aspects, artificial intelligence is still unable to compare with the neurons of the human brain. How the human brain generates awareness is still a mystery and needs to be solved by later scientists. The original title The Difference Between Optimizing and Evolving.

Image credit: Paul Burns / Getty Issues

Artificial intelligence is not life.

Because they will not evolve. Although artificial intelligence may iterate and optimize, but that is not evolution. Evolution is random mutation in a specific environment. In contrast, machine learning is aimed at a specific, pre-programmed purpose. It may be complicated, but not as complicated as evolution, weather, ocean, or nature. Complex systems, such as traffic lights that can be seen everywhere in cities, can direct the actions of people and cars. In contrast, complex systems, such as transportation circles, can spontaneously form flows through the interaction of many participants. The machine has many complicated parts and processes, but there is no higher order; the complexity of life is born out of them.

No matter how many names people give to new functions of computers that sound like neurological terms, computers are not aware. Some people are keen to imagine what computers will look like in the future. They like to use terms such as "fuzzy logic", believing that these programming techniques can make computers operate closer to human thinking. Fuzzy logic means that computer programs can handle values ​​other than 1 or 0 and can represent them as 1 or 0. This is the whole meaning of fuzzy logic. It can be seen that in the face of real uncertainty, fuzzy logic is not fuzzy at all. It just reduces the roughness and complexity of the real world to binary that can be processed by the computer.

Likewise, neural networks are not like the human brain. A neural network has layers of nodes, and its way of learning new knowledge is to analyze hundreds of cases input from the outside world. Instead of describing what a cat looks like to the computer, we feed it hundreds of pictures of "cats" until it can determine the common and distinguishable features of "cats" in these pictures. However, humans can generalize the category of "cats" only by seeing a photo of a cat. How does the human brain do it? We are not so sure.

We cannot say exactly what it means to be a thoughtful, conscious human being, but this should not be considered a shortcoming of the human brain. Human thinking is not computer-based, and reality itself is only information. The human brain has intelligence, which is a unique ability of the brain; there are a lot of data in reality, but if there is no human consciousness to reflect them, then the human brain and these data are meaningless. We cannot downgrade human consciousness to primitive processing power. For example, the human body can certainly lift weights, but we can never lift heavy objects as lightly as a crane. Similarly, our calculation speed cannot be compared with supercomputers. But the value of human beings is far more diverse than mere "usefulness". Using technological intervention or directly replacing the human brain with technology to strengthen an index that is conducive to employment will only forget other potentially more important values, the most important of which is consciousness itself.

Science has shown that consciousness is a completely incalculable quantum state in the tiniest structure of the brain-microtubules. In the human brain, there are billions of these microtubules, and each microtubule has many active points. If all the computer chips in the world are integrated into a computer, this computer will also be in the human brain. Defeated in front of the complex.

Only computer developers will act as if consciousness is simple enough to be replicated by machines. Real neuroscientists are still confused about the impossibility of self-awareness in a bunch of neurons. This conclusion contradicts reality.

This does not mean that we will quickly deny the existence of consciousness. Consciousness is not an illusion of human brain caused by DNA in order for people to have survival instincts. We do not live in a virtual world. Our consciousness is real. With the development of physics up to now, even physicists have admitted that the reason for the existence of consciousness is more sufficient than the existence of objective reality: quantum theory believes that it may not exist before we observe objective reality. In other words, the universe is a bunch of possibilities, until someone's consciousness approaches it and sees it in a certain way, then it can condense into what we call reality.

Searching for the origin of consciousness is a bit like searching for the smallest cosmic particles. It is more like a doctrine from the perspective of mechanistic science, rather than a true reflection of how the brain works. Whenever we find a final determinant, such as a gene, we will later discover that it is determined by something else. Once we discover a certain pathogenic bacteria, we will grasp its characteristics, discover the most suitable environment for its growth, and even discover the mechanism that causes it to cause disease. The only way to solve the problem of the origin of consciousness is through first-hand experience. In addition, when researching, we should maintain respect for the world in which we live and the other people who share the whole world with us.

In this sense, we know the existence of consciousness because we know how it feels. There is a cup of coffee on the kitchen table, we can see it, animals or computers can also see it, but humans are different, humans also know what it feels like to see a cup of coffee on the table. Choosing to look at that cup and noticing it is the uniqueness of human consciousness. Computers can’t do this. They can only see everything within the camera’s range. They don’t “pay attention”, they don’t have the focus of their sight. Know the real direction.

To understand what it feels like to look at a cup of coffee, you need to construct your mind and self. Currently, only humans can do this, because humans are humans and computers are just objects.

Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Human Team". Image source: Internet

This article is section 58 of Douglas Rushkoff's new book "Human Team".

Dialogue with the most grassroots robotic dog team in China: There is no money to build an official website, and the product is favored by Samsung

 The future of quadruped robots on the streets

"For entrepreneurs, the epidemic is not the most terrible thing, no money is." When Dogotix's founder Zhao Tongyang said this, it completely hit me.

Indeed, before contacting Zhao Tongyang, I couldn't associate the keywords of "no income for 4 years, 5 people" with a small accomplished robot startup, but in fact, they did just that.

▲The quadruped robot developed by Dogotix turns in circles at the door of the company

Nowadays, when it comes to "robotic dog", most people think of the yellow one. It just exposed the 260 Boston Dynamics robot dog Spot mini that has been sold. And it seems that just after Spot mini announced its sale in June this year, various “robot dogs” at home and abroad have sprung up, and domestic manufacturers such as Huawei and DJI have also stepped into this industry. Crowded.

▲Boston Dynamics Spot mini

However, due to time lag, many "robotic dogs" will inevitably be criticized as "fake products." We can’t get all the stories of robot dogs on the market, but the birth of some robot dogs must not be so simple. After all, to make a “robotic dog” that “can run, jump, and not be afraid of falling” is not just a copy of the code. Made it out.

As various types of "robotic dogs" continue to appear in recent months, Zhixi found from information such as "the latest domestic robot dog debut", "with independent research and development capabilities", and "the price is less than one-tenth of the Boston Dynamics robot dog". The team behind this "domestic robot dog"-Dogotix has enough robots.

According to Dogotix founder Zhao Tongyang, he decided to start robots in 2016. Then why is the establishment of Dogotix at the end of 2019, where did the four disappearing years go? Why did Dogotix only get the angel round of financing in August this year, and launched two new second-generation products in September?

With doubts about the contradictions of time nodes and curiosity about the domestic robotic dog industry, we found Zhao Tongyang, the founder of Dogotix. In the conversation with him, Zhizhi learned the story behind Dogotix and their robot dog.

▲ Zhao Tongyang, founder of Dogotix

01  can run, jump, afraid to fall, but by consumers "Tucao" No official website

The night before the interview with Zhishi, Zhao Tongyang’s circle of friends updated a message: "The first'Smecta' customer is Samsung. We will make products that excite the world, but it is so poor that there is no official website... …"

This joy reveals an awkward circle of friends, and also casts a layer of mystery on Dogotix. What are the products that the Korean giant Samsung will be attracted to? Why is it so poor that there is no official website? The reason for this, let us find out with the dialogue with Zhao Tongyang .

On September 23 this year, Dogotix officially released two second-generation high-performance bionic quadruped robots that have entered mass production. They are the "Big Dog" DG-160A and the "Puppy" DG-48A.

▲Dogotix first and second generation bionic quadruped robots

Among them, "Big Dog" DG-160A has a dead weight of 25 kg and can load 14 kg of heavy objects, with a peak power unit torque of 180N.m; "Puppy" DG-48A has a dead weight of 13 kg and can load 6 kg of heavy objects, with peak power unit The torque is 48N.m, both of which take into account the requirements of load-bearing and high dynamic performance.

As a "robotic dog", in order to prove its own strength, it is inevitable to match the "destiny" of the "excellent job"-Boston Dynamics Spot mini, and in the performance benchmarking table of public data on the Internet, Dogotix's "big dog" DG-160A not only has not been "crushed" by Spot mini, it is even better in terms of running speed, built-in battery life, etc. The most important thing is that the price of "Big Dog" is only a dozen points of Spot mini one.

▲Dogotix's second-generation quadruped bionic robot benchmarked with Boston Dynamics Spot mini, data source: public data from Robot Lecture Hall and provided by Dogotix

Zhao Tongyang said: “For a footed robot, walking well, walking fast, and walking steadily are the most basic requirements. Our newly launched second-generation products have implemented hardware and algorithms such as motors, controllers, and detectors. Improvement. In terms of power, the second-generation product is 8-10 times higher than the first-generation product, with stronger load capacity and faster running. In terms of algorithm, the stability and impact resistance of the second-generation product are also somewhat Promote."

"This time we have also upgraded the transmission. In the past, the traditional belt was used for transmission, which was easy to slip and has a high rate of wear and tear. This time, the improvement to the leg link transmission mechanism solved these problems."

"The second-generation'dog' has a bigger belly, and users can put more things in the'dog belly'." Zhao Tongyang said, "There are three prerequisites for the bionic foot robot to enter thousands of households. One is stable and durable enough. The machine itself; the second is the retail price acceptable to consumer-level groups; the third is the ability to actually solve family affairs."

"Our first-generation products are mainly for research institutes and universities, for researchers to conduct research; the second-generation products are mainly targeted at B-end users in terms of mechanical ontology, and entering the C-end market also requires security It will take a while for us to achieve greater improvements in terms of functionality, functionality and practicality."

In addition, in terms of battery life, the Dogotix team also applied autonomous wireless non-contact charging and solar charging based on machine vision to these two robots. When the robot is working indoors, it can autonomously detect its own power, and completely autonomously find its own non-contact wireless charging pile and complete autonomous charging when the power is insufficient; when the robot is working outdoors, the solar panels on the robot housing are also It can help the robot complete autonomous charging. In this way, even if the robot dog leaves human beings, it can survive and perform neural network evolution.

▲Solar panels on the housing of the Dogotix quadruped robot

In terms of cost, the reason for the lower price of Dogotix is ​​partly due to the unique geographical location of Shenzhen. Zhao Tongyang said: “Shenzhen’s manufacturing capacity is very strong, so we have a lot of components here that can be produced at very low prices. In addition, we are different from the solutions adopted by Boston Dynamics. The manufacturing cost of the Boston Dynamics robot dog is different. It is basically 10 times that of ours. They position the robot dog as a "special product", and we position the robot dog as a "consumer product"."

Zhao Tongyang told Zhishi that quadruped robots are a comprehensive discipline and an emerging industry. From hardware, software to low-level motors, they are constantly iterating. Therefore, many technologies require team members to learn more by reading papers and checking materials. ,Devolop product.

What’s more difficult is that they are not backed by Google and Softbank like Boston Dynamics. The four years of Dogotix's product development are like watching eight pack abs eating a fat-reducing meal, relying on the dream of being a robot, difficult and hopeful forward.

02  Eight people spent four years making robot dogs, and they were overcoming obstacles on the road to "mercury retrograde"

Through public business information channels, it can be found that Dogotix was established in November 2019 and launched the first-generation robot dog at the end of 2019. In August this year, it received an angel round financing of 5 million yuan in ropeway investment, and launched two second-generation models in September. Robot dog.

The speed of Dogotix's growth is surprisingly fast, and when I guessed and asked, "Is there a huge team behind the company's efficiency," Zhao Tongyang's answer surprised me again. He said: "This year Before August, our company had only 8 core technical personnel together. These 8 people perform their own duties, including software algorithm engineers, mechanical design engineers, hardware circuit engineers, embedded engineers, etc., and a "lady" for logistics At work, those of us have met in the network "technology development circle" and have gathered together and have been working hard for a dream."

Zhishi's doubts about the contradictory timing of the company's establishment and product launch will also be solved in this dream-filled story.

Zhao Tongyang's robot dream will start in 2012. Affected by his family, Zhao Tongyang at the time lamented the fragility and shortness of life. He began to wonder if he could create eternal life and be able to accompany mankind forever. In this way, Zhao Tongyang, a major in automation control, turned his attention to bionic robots and decided to continue his life in a robot way.

Each stage of the realization of the dream was not smooth sailing. At that time, Zhao Tongyang knew very well that in 2012, there were very few experiences in the field of bionic robots in China. If we started to develop bionic robots at that time, it would be as difficult as entering no man’s land.

At that time, coincided with the rise of the Internet of Things industry, Zhao Tongyang, a university graduate, began to get involved in the Internet of Things industry and founded Shenzhen Anxinke Technology Company.

Four years have passed. By 2016, the company has grown from one person to 100 people. Zhao Tongyang also has a certain amount of capital in his hands. He thinks it is time to pursue his dream and become a robot. Therefore, he decisively transfers shares and invests in the wave of bionic robots for the second time.

But just like Lei Jun said, "Entrepreneurship is not something people do," Zhao Tongyang's second entrepreneurial experience was not smooth. First of all, from choosing products, Zhao Tongyang and his team took a big turn.

In line with the original intention to accompany life and be a "soul" robot, Zhao Tongyang entered the biped robot industry, but he soon discovered that biped robots have technical requirements for balance and stability, motion software algorithms, and power output. High, the development is more difficult, so the cost is also high, even if it is made at that time, there will not be too many people paying the bill. Biped robots and quadruped robots have very similar requirements in the research and development of the mechanical body. Therefore, he aimed at the quadruped robot market and started the research and development of the bionic quadruped robot-the "robot".

In terms of capital, Zhao Tongyang once again encountered difficulties because of the focus on R&D and the company's pure investment was not profitable. From the start of a robotics company to the launch of a relatively mature robot dog by Dogotix, Zhao Tongyang’s company "died" twice due to a shortage of funds. In other words, the Dogotix that helped him usher in the dawn was the third robot company he founded in four years. .

"Mercury retrograde" never patronizes only once. Just when Zhao Tongyang and his team thought that their quadruped robot was about to be successfully developed, the news of the open source of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) quadruped robot "Mini Cheetah" in 2019 was like a thunder, giving They hit them hard.

▲MIT’s quadruped robot "Mini Cheetah"

When learning that the cost of developing MIT quadruped robots was very low, Zhao Tongyang and his team members felt that their efforts were in vain. Being "robbed" for the "starter", the product has no advantage, and the team fell into despair for an instant. But God seems to favor people who don’t give up. After adjusting their mood, they took MIT's open source materials to study carefully and found that the robot dog developed did not work well, so they also learned that good products cannot be produced without open source files. The accumulation of technology is still the confidence of their research and development.

Zhao Tongyang understands that the perfection of quadruped robot technology requires continuous iterations of both theory and practice. It is calculated as one, and the products produced may be different. In this field, practice and theory complement each other, even for Boston Dynamics and MIT. , It is not only supported by papers, but also through several generations of product iterations to verify their algorithms in practice, and continuous improvement of performance can achieve a balance between theory and practice in products.

Then, Zhao Tongyang and the team regained their mood and overthrew the past technology and restarted. In terms of hardware, they try to reduce the weight of the mechanical body and increase the torque to increase the rotation speed, so that the robot can move stably and flexibly. In terms of software, in order to enable the robot dog to avoid obstacles and walk stably, they equipped the robot dog with a whole-body motion control algorithm to ensure the sensitivity of the robot dog and keep its body in a stable state.

The first-generation robotic dog developed by Dogotix is ​​finally available. Although the first-generation robot dog of Dogotix has been questioned due to its similar appearance to the MIT robot dog, everyone in the Dogotix technical team knows that the first-generation robot dog is all its own technology.

This robot dog can flip, roll, pull carts, walk and jump on the ground of different materials, and can automatically maintain balance when subjected to external forces... The launch of the first Dogotix robot dog has attracted the attention of domestic robot enthusiasts.

▲Dogotix's first-generation quadruped robot performs a backflip

▲Dogotix's first-generation quadruped robot walks on a cart

Next, Dogotix will continue to increase investment in the robot's mechanical body and power system, and focus on the research and development of application layers such as visual recognition, autonomous navigation operation, and collaborative control, and develop bionic foot robots suitable for applications in different scenarios.

Zhao Tongyang told Zhishi: "Our robot dogs can be searched on major e-commerce platforms. At present, the first generation of robot dogs has sold 100 to 200 units." At the same time, according to the information we have learned, Dogotix is ​​the first. The unit price of the second-generation product is 18,000 yuan, and it has been continuously supplied in batches with a delivery period of 1 to 2 weeks; the second-generation product "Big Dog" DG-160A and Puppy DG-48A are also being planned for mass production after the launch. In addition, Dogotix also plans to launch the third-generation bionic foot robot in the first half of next year.

▲Dogotix quadruped robot product picture on Taobao

In this way, if Samsung can't find the official website of Dogotix, it may be possible to find the Dogotix robot dog that Samsung wants to buy by moving to Taobao stores and Amazon.

Zhao Tongyang said that he will invest the newly-financed 5 million yuan in three aspects: expansion of R&D team, product upgrade and commercialization, and establishment of standardized production workshops. He hopes to improve existing products while selling them at home and abroad. He thinks that when the quadruped robot is on the right track, he will continue to pursue the dream of biped robots and finally realize the dream of having a "soul" robot accompany people.

03  "People with four legs" or enter the family scene

From beginning to end, Zhao Tongyang regarded the robot dog he and his team developed as a "four-legged person" rather than a "machine tool". In Zhao Tongyang's eyes, four-legged robots have unlimited imagination, and they are a group of " Creatures with life and soul".

Zhao Tongyang told Zhishi: "The robot dog has a wide range of uses. It can help with logistics and distribution, power inspections, fire rescue... It can go to dangerous areas that humans cannot go or are inconvenient to go to and help humans complete tasks."

"What we can do is to do a good job of the machine body, and then open source and open the interface, allowing customers to develop targeted software for different scenarios. This is also the biggest difference in our robots."

Currently, Dogotix's "Big Dog" DG-160A and "Puppy" DG-48A can be equipped with additional components such as robotic arms, lidar, AI, and 3D modeling for use in different scenarios.

In Zhao Tongyang’s robot blueprint, he said that in the next 12 months, Dogotix should have a family-oriented four-legged robot that can accompany family members like a real “dog”. This “dog” can have Emotional, able to be angry, able to expect, able to be happy, able to accompany the elderly and children.

In terms of function, this "dog" can monitor the heartbeat of family members, monitor the mental state of the elderly, and observe the situation of the elderly through machine vision, and alarm when the elderly falls and other abnormal conditions. Zhao Tongyang said that the future four-legged robot can realize the role of family companion and family protection.

Zhao Tongyang said: "Four-legged robots are a long-term business, and we will continue to do so. We have been able to see our'robotic dogs' on the street. This is considered to be more than half of our business success. This point also proves that we still have a lot to improve."

"On the other hand, we will not be limited to only four-legged robots, but also bipedal robots. At the beginning of our business, we gave up doing bipedal robots because of immaturity in various aspects. I still hope that in the future biped robots can enter all walks of life, and even enter the family. When we get old one day, we will find that many of us who accompany us are robots."

Zhao Tongyang’s robot blueprint does not seem to be a corporate plan, but instead links the future of the product with his own life plan.

04  Overview of domestic foot robot players

Although abroad, the footed robots developed by Boston Dynamics, which has 20 years of technology accumulation, continue to win people’s attention, but domestic footed robots are not weak in research and development. As early as more than ten years ago, domestic universities have already Involved in the research of footed robots.

In 2017, Shandong University lasted ten years to build a large four-legged robot-Shandong version of the "robot dog". In the University Robotics Competition two years later, the flexible robots displayed by the Harbin Institute of Technology Competitive Robotics Team were even more amazing.

▲Shandong version of "robotic dog"

▲HIT Robot "Treading Waves"

According to Dogotix, the bionic foot robot is a comprehensive discipline that gradually faces the market after years of hardware improvement and theoretical algorithm iteration. In the past research results of footed robots, many use hydraulic solutions to provide power, but this solution is difficult to solve the shortcomings of excessive weight and noise. With the introduction of the electric scheme, the weight and noise have been greatly reduced, and the footed robot has gradually entered people's field of vision.

In recent years, the domestic foot robot market has gradually become lively. There was a "hot search" on the Yushu robot dog before, and then there were excellent humanoid robots participating in the 40th anniversary party of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. It can be seen that there are more and more teams exploring the field of foot robots in China, and Zhao Tongyang and His team is just a microcosm of most domestic bionic foot robot dream chasers. From the constantly upgraded robots, we seem to be able to see the persistence and persistence of these dream chasers to bionic foot robots.

▲ Yushu’s four-legged robot "Laikago" (Laikago)

05  Conclusion: The future of quadruped robots on the streets can be expected

"Five people" "4 years of pure investment without profit" "With independent research and development capabilities" "Second-generation robotic dog sales" These keywords are like medals, engraved in the development history of Dogotix.

Looking at the robotics industry where large factories and well-known universities gather, Zhao Tongyang and his Dogotix seem to be a "mudslide" in this environment, aiming at the target with great power.

Although the "quadruped robot circle" is gradually growing and becoming lively, the industry is still in its early stages. Maybe a year later, four-legged robots walking on the street and accompanying humans will be like Zhao Tongyang said, no longer imagined.