This $7 billion valuation unicorn is going to benchmark Tesla
“There is actually only one company that our company is benchmarking against – Tesla.”
On the eve of the launch event on August 18, Jiang Qingsong, a partner of Zhiyuan Robotics, described their route vision to Tiger Sense this way. Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus Prime’s initial application scenario is in factories, which is also the scenario that Zhiyuan is focusing on betting on.
Wisdom’s commercialization scenarios focus on delivery service scenarios such as showrooms and 4S stores, and industrial scenarios in 3C and semiconductor manufacturing factories, and it will be able to reach an estimated shipment of about 300 units (200 bipedal and 100 wheeled) this year.
In addition, like Tesla, Zhiyuan Robotics has also chosen the data-driven route.
However, there are some voices in the industry that think it’s not necessary to take Tesla’s stuff as a given. After all, the current commercialization plan for Tesla Optimus Prime has been delayed until 2026.
Tesla’s superior resources can support the slow commercial landing process of humanoid robots, while Zhiyuan Robotics needs to enter the commercial stage directly and achieve some commercialization in a short period of time before it can support specific R&D. Therefore, Zhiyuan robot will have a lot of intermediate products to meet the commercial scene, and then slowly to a higher goal – into the family scene to go forward.
This route of commercialization by picking “low-hanging fruit” is the common choice of many domestic companies with body intelligence. However, the current valuation of 7 billion Ji Yuan Robotics is already one of the companies that have gotten the most hot money in the field of body intelligence.
Start Company – Zhiyuan Robotics
Zhiyuan Robotics is a star company in the embodied intelligence track and one of the “new four dragons” of embodied intelligence emerging from this wave of big models. Co-founder “Zhihui Jun” Peng Zhihui is a 90-year-old former Huawei “genius boy”, who has 2.58 million fans on the B station.In February 2023, Zhihui Jun partnered with Yan Weixin, a professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University, to formally set up Zhiyuan Robotics in Shanghai, which now has close to 350 employees.
After the launch of the first generation of robot Zhiyuan Expedition A1, Zhiyuan Robotics got several rounds of financing such as angel rounds, A rounds, A1 rounds, A1+ rounds, A2 rounds, A3 rounds, A4 rounds, etc., and its pre-investment valuation has reached 7 billion yuan, which includes a number of head institutions such as Gao Tiles, Matrix Partners, DingHui, Banyan Tree, BlueChip, Sequoia China, etc., as well as industrial capitals such as BYD, SAIC Venture Capital, and Baidu Venture Capital, etc., and it is planned to early next year to launch a new round of B round financing.
On August 18, Peng Zhihui, co-founder of Zhiyuan Robotics, hosted and released five new commercial humanoid robots – Expedition A2 – from the two series of “Expedition” and “Rhinoceros”, Expedition A2-W, Expedition A2-Max, Spirit Rhinoceros X1 and Spirit Rhinoceros X1-W, and showed the independent R&D achievements in the four major fields of robot power, perception, communication and control, as well as the technology roadmap of Embodied Intelligence G1 to G5 and the AIDEA Embodied Intelligence data system.
At the conference, Zhiyuan Robotics announced its open source plans, including: AimRT, a high-performance communication framework for intelligent robots, will be open sourced at the end of September, and Linghuo X1 incubated by X-Lab will be open sourced full-stack one after another in September, and it also previewed that millions of real machines and ten million simulation data sets based on AIDEA will be open sourced in the fourth quarter of this year.
All in humanoid robots
Jiang Qingsong told Hufeng that the company’s focus is on general-purpose humanoid robots. Among the five new robots released, two wheeled humanoid robots are more needed by factories. They believe that although bipedal is the ultimate form of robot, there are more limitations – such as reliability and power consumption range.
But what factories need now is a form that can complete the process – the upper body of the wheeled is humanoid, able to perform double-arm synergy, coupled with the addition of some brain technology, basically able to solve some of the generalized scenarios in factories.
The foot robot is more often used in marketing customer service, interactive service scenes and other scenes.
In addition to humanoid robots, in March this year, Zhiyuan Robotics also released a commercial cleaning robots.
They were considered through the commercialization of products to build sales channels, in addition to the two products chassis slam technology can be achieved interoperability, mainly for factories on the scene, there is also a cross of customers.
At present, Zhiyuan Robotics in Shanghai Lingang factory, has entered the final stage of preparation for mass production. It is expected to start production in October, and mass production will reach one million in November. Jiang Qingsong told Tiger Sense, the hardware of the domestic rate is very high, almost all the hardware from domestic procurement.
In terms of cost, the height of basically about 1.7 meters in the general humanoid robot, the production process is difficult, the cost of about 250,000 to 300,000 yuan, the market price of about 600,000 to 700,000 yuan.
The smaller robots at around 1.3 meters cost less because of the low center of gravity and simple manufacturing, but Jiang Qingsong made it clear to HuffPost that he “won’t go into a price war, but rather open-source it and provide the parts so that tech-savvy and tech-geeks can quickly master the technology of the humanoid robot.”
Therefore, this time Zhiyuan Robotics released a full-stack open-source robot – Rhinoceros X1, their ultimate ideal is to realize the “humanoid robot man-made” through open source.
Open source to break the data barrier
Less data, high cost is the current pain point of embodied intelligence, according to statistics, the text of the data has 15T, the picture is 6B, the video has 2.6B, but the embodied intelligence data is only 2.4M.
Based on this, the solution proposed by Zhiyuan Robotics is the full-process embodied data program – AIDEA. millions of real machines and ten million simulation data sets based on AIDEA will be open-sourced in the fourth quarter of this year.
Jiang Qingsong disclosed to Huffington Post that Zhiyuan Robotics has just built a training factory of about 30 units, and it is expected that by the end of September, a collection factory of about 100 units will be built. Next will enter a phase of data mass production.
The real machine data cost is higher, but the efficiency is very high, about 6,000 real machine data can be trained into a more generalized effect of an action; simulation data, although the cost is low, but the effect is only 60% to 70% of the real machine data.
For the existing market pattern of body intelligence, Jiang Qingsong believes that the industry is still in the stage of choosing a track over competition. And there are not many players like Zhiyuan Robotics betting on the industrial scene track. This is because the industrial market space is the largest, but the difficulty of entry is also the largest.
Jiyuan Robotics summarizes the current industrial scenario as “PPT” (short for pick place and transfer) – Pick Place Transfer. Industrial scenarios require good enough generalization ability, and this year JiYuan Robotics has proved the feasibility of this direction through some breakthroughs, such as loading and unloading of parts and battery insertion and connection scenarios, which also allow JiYuan Robotics to meet the manufacturing needs of the 3C semiconductor industry.
Jiang Qingsong believes that the robot into the factory does not exist to replace blue-collar workers, but to improve production efficiency. It plays more of a complementary role in production, while some new positions are created, such as data collector, trainer, researcher and so on.
Although the robotic arm application is still the mainstream choice in traditional factory scenarios, Zhiyuan Robotics believes that it still has many shortcomings. The key to humanoid robotics technology is still the development of brain technology, through multi-modal perception to achieve whole-body coordination, the brain into the robotic arm inside to truly realize certain generalized products. And this is where the opportunities for humanoid robots such as Zhiyuan lie.
Read More:
Google’s Antitrust: Losing Android Lead to a Major Market Shift?
