Lidar Will Become The Standard Configuration Of Sweeping robot

Lidar will become the standard configuration of sweeping robot

Published at 14:18 on September 28, 2022

Entrepreneurship is a long way to go.

"After solving the mass production problem, do you feel relaxed?" Yioti asked.

Zhou Kun pursed his lips and said, "At this stage, we have solved the problem of mass production of hundreds of thousands of units a year. At the next stage, we will have new things to solve. After all, the problems of mass production of 500000 units and 1 million units will be different."

Recently, an article "Shenzhen Doctor on the assembly line" was widely spread on the Internet, opening up a story about the need for scientific research doctors to go to the manufacturing front line when they are engaged in entrepreneurship. Half a year later, Yiou again interviewed Zhou Kun, the founder of Huanchuang Technology, one of the heroes in the article, to listen to his story in the process of mass production of laser radar.

Follow the trend of "service robot" and aim at laser radar

In recent years, driven by the rise of the lazy economy, the promotion of consumption upgrading trend, and the smart home vent, the sweeping robot in China has ushered in a development market that has begun to take shape. Zhou Kun, who is deeply engaged in the field of computer vision spatial positioning, also expressed his optimism about the market of sweeping robots on many occasions.

According to the data of Zhongyikang, the sales volume and sales volume of China's floor sweeping robots doubled from 2013 to 2017, and maintained a rapid growth, and achieved a doubling development in five years. However, compared with Europe and the United States, the penetration rate of Chinese sweeping robots is still low, and they will still face a broad market in the future.

The sweeping robot has experienced three technological changes, which are divided into random and planning categories according to the sweeping path. The user experience of the first generation of random walking sweeping robots was extremely poor. It was only after the emergence of intelligent navigation sweeping robots that the market potential was stimulated.

Zhou Kun believes that it is imperative to upgrade and upgrade the sweeping robot. Eventually, it will move from a random blind collision sweeping robot to an intelligent and navigation sweeping robot, and the sweeping robot equipped with a standard laser radar will become the mainstream of the market.

It is not difficult to understand the working principle of the lidar using geometric principles for measurement. The light source emits a laser beam, and the beam returns to the image sensor after touching the object. The radar module can calculate the distance between the transmitter and the object by using the geometric parameters calibrated in advance according to the imaging of the transmitted and received signals on the image sensor.

In the whole measurement process, the lidar can feed back rich information such as range, angle, reflection intensity and so on by virtue of its high range resolution and angle resolution, and then generate multi-dimensional images to help the system understand the detection target in detail.

According to Reuters data, about 50 lidar start-ups have received investments totaling more than US $1 billion in the past three years, including US $420 million in 2018. It is not difficult to see that lidar has become a fertile land for practitioners to flock to. In the process of exploring business scenarios, Huanchuang also targeted this field early.

After two years of exploration and preparation, Huanchuang Technology's lidar product line was mass produced and shipped last year, and has become the exclusive radar supplier for many robot customers at home and abroad. "Our overall business focus this year is in the field of sweeping robots, which is expected to account for more than 90%, of which the sense X1 is our main product this year." Zhou Kun said.

Compared with the expensive market purchase price of most sweeper manufacturers, the cost of Huanchuang's lidar has been greatly reduced through technological innovation and improvement.

"LIDAR, like other electronic products, can be divided into low and high seasons. We usually produce according to orders. The shipment volume in low season is about 30000 units, and that in high season will reach 100000 units or more." Zhou Kun said.

Open the market, both parity and reliability are indispensable

Under the shackles of high cost, the laser radar was once considered to be only able to dazzle technology and cannot be mass produced. Its cost was mainly composed of material cost and production cost.

At present, most of the mainstream robot laser radars in the market use industrial linear image sensors with high frame rate. However, the expensive cost limits the popularity of laser radars in the robot field. In addition, its vertical field of vision is only about 0.15 ° to 0.16 °, which requires extremely high assembly accuracy and stability, and large-scale mass production is challenged.

"In the process of use, the drop, external vibration and slight deformation caused by high and low temperature of the product will affect the stability of the product, and increase the after-sales cost virtually." Zhou Kun pointed out that.

In addition to sensors, another source of high cost is chips.

The lidar works in a rotary scanning mode. One light source sweeps one circle to obtain a 360 degree horizontal circular line of sight. The more light sources, the denser the line of sight, and the higher the resolution of the real-time map. Increasing the number of lidar lines in the traditional way will cause the product volume to be multiplied and increase the difficulty of mass production. In order to reduce the size of the lidar, it requires special chips with strong computing power and high efficiency.

For the sake of cost and avoiding the occurrence of "neck jam", Huanchuang has adopted customized array consumer sensors and self-developed laser radar ASIC special chip Camsense C1. The cost of the area array consumer level sensor has reached the consumer level, and the vertical field of vision can reach 30-40 degrees. At the same time, the image processing algorithm with independent intellectual property rights is built in, which can make the frame rate reach more than 2000Hz.

In recent years, many sensors are following the path of using ordinary consumer grade components+unique algorithms, so the cost is reduced at once.

"We started to prepare our own chips at the beginning of 2017, and successfully developed and launched them into the market at the end of 2018." Zhou Kun said that the frame rate of the lidar used by other brands can actually reach 4000Hz, but due to the computing power and efficiency of the back end, it can only reach 1800Hz.

To create a product with high market acceptance, light parity is not enough, and reliability is also crucial. In thousands of experiments, Huanchuang has designed very strict R&D test standards to ensure the stability of products.

For example, when a sweeper is working outdoors, from the perspective of a visual sensor, the camera is extremely vulnerable to the interference of background light or strong light, resulting in the signal being flooded by the sun and the ranging function being completely disabled. Therefore, Huanchuang's test includes a high-intensity anti glare interference test to ensure that the product can work normally outdoors at noon in summer.

Other tests include long service life test, harsh high and low temperature storage test, strict vibration test, drop test and high-intensity dust resistance test.

Before a product is launched, it will go through several stages, such as R&D, testing, trial production and mass production. It is reported that Huanchuang Technology has its own trial production workshop, and all products will be trial produced in the trial production workshop before mass production.

"Since we built our own pilot production workshop in 2018, we have produced nearly thousands of products before and after the trial production. These products are only used for pilot production before large-scale production, and will not be sold as final products. Finally, they will all be scrapped." Zhou Kun said.

After talking about R&D, testing and trial production, let's talk about the challenging mass production links.

Mass production is not easy, strict control over supplier selection and production process

Standing at the forefront of technical theory and putting theory into production is not an easy pass. Along the way, Huanchuang has also experienced various tests on the road of mass production of laser radar.

The biggest challenge during this period is the process of establishing standards.

At present, the laser radar industry has not yet formed a unified standard in the industry. Most customers do not know what threshold range the service life, impact resistance, high temperature and low temperature resistance and other parameters of the laser radar products they need should be set in. Generally, they wait until the products are shipped, and then give feedback when they encounter problems.

Once again, the cost of production and commissioning is particularly high.

"In the early stage, due to the lack of industry standards, there was no unified judgment rule for what is a qualified and reliable lidar. Fortunately, we have contacted many customers, and in the early stage, most of them were brand customers and large solution companies in the industry. They have rich experience and will put forward such and such requirements for us." Zhou Kun pointed out that.

"At that time, our approach was to collect the standards of each customer, take the highest requirements as the basis, and then improve on this basis. After repeated inspection and iteration of actual mass production, we finally formed our own enterprise standards. At present, many customers we serve require us to provide our own inspection standards as their inspection standards."

The second key is the supply chain management problem that is common in the hardware manufacturing field. In most of the physical manufacturing industries, there is a process of capacity climbing, especially the stage starting from zero.

Zhou Kun told Yiou that when the order volume was relatively small, the large foundry factories could not see these orders at all. At the beginning, they had to rely on their contacts in the industry to find suppliers.

Speaking of this, Zhou Kun gave full play to his strict nature in scientific research in terms of supplier selection and production process control.

In the past year, in order to find the most suitable supplier, Zhou Kun almost went all over the Pearl River Delta to communicate with the heads of each factory. He went down to look at the production line and dared not slack off at all.

Zhou Kun said that after many improvements, Huanchuang has summarized a set of perfect management and control processes. It has strict supplier introduction process and high standard quality assurance agreement, follows strict IQC incoming inspection standards, and even controls the accuracy of screws.

In the process control, Huanchuang has formulated detailed operation instructions, and set up strict on-site inspection and punishment for illegal operations in the process.

For example, a dispensing process needs to check the amount and position of glue; Screws at different positions of the radar need to use electric screwdrivers with different torques. Workers need to wear electrostatic bracelets and electrostatic clothing.

It is reported that all products of Huanchuang will pass high temperature and low temperature impact tests, vibration impact tests and aging operation tests. A series of processes can ensure high pass through rate and low market repair rate.

"Through technological innovation, including sensors and chips, we reduced the cost by 40%; at the same time, the strict quality control system increased our production cost by 10%." Zhou Kun said with a smile that Huanchuang's annual shipment will reach hundreds of thousands in 2019.

Not surprisingly, the increase of production capacity can drive down the price trend, and the R&D cost will be gradually shared equally. There are a lot of players entering and leaving the Jianghu with Lidar. There is a long way to go. Zhou Kun said that there are still many new problems to solve in the future.