Last year's 618 Shopping Festival, China Smartphone shipments reached 14 million units, down from previous years. And in AI oT terminal market, with the post-90 s consumers for families Intelligence the rising demand for chemicals sweeps the floor Robot Demand continues to rise, becoming a new growth track.
According to the online channel monitoring data of AVC, from May 30, 2022 to June 19, 2022, the online market sales of sweeping robots in China reached 1.957 billion, up 28% year-on-year, and the sales volume reached 575,700 units, with an average price of 3,399 yuan, up 38% year-on-year. The driving force for the growth of industry scale is mainly due to the average price increase driven by the upgrading of product structure to all-round models. According to statistics,
The market scale of sweeping robots continues to grow, and the intelligence of the Chinese market is advancing the fastest
Recently, Allwinner technology Mr. Li Zhen, General Manager of Pan-operator Customer Division, shared the forecast of sweeping robot market with the media. In 2019, the global sweeping robot market shipped 9 million units. According to the market forecast, the compound annual growth rate of global sweeping robot sales will reach over 35% from 2019 to 2024, and the global shipments are expected to reach 27 million units in 2024.
According to the White Paper on the Development of Sweeping Robot Market in 2021 released by China Home Grid last year, China has become the largest sweeping robot market in the world. At present, the market penetration rate of sweeping robot, a new cleaning household appliance category, is low in China, only about 6% in 2021, and there is still a certain gap compared with the penetration rate of more than 16% in overseas developed countries such as the United States and Japan.
Sweeping Robot Market Size
The function of sweeping robot is to free hands and let the robot clean the floor instead of manpower. But its core is not "sweeping the floor", but "precise navigation" and "perfect obstacle avoidance"-cleverly avoiding all obstacles, planning cleaning routes and cleaning every dead corner. These two key functions require intelligent technology.
In 2010, Neato launched the first global planning sweeping robot NeatoXV-11 based on lidar navigation, which relies on sensor get the surrounding environment .information, and then use the unique AI algorithm carry out the whole house map construction, but the technology is not mature. After 2015, the technology has been iterated many times and matured day by day. iRobot Roomba980 and Cobos Dibao DR9 series have been released one after another, marking that the sweeping robot has entered the intelligent era.
Around 2019, the head enterprises of domestic sweeping robots Cobos, Baole and Stone science and technology take the lead in launching flagship products equipped with AI visual obstacle avoidance technology in navigation and obstacle avoidance technology. In 2020, Cobos applied the space-class dToF navigation technology to its flagship products, which pushed forward the technology of the sweeping robot industry as a whole.
From the perspective of market competition brands, from traditional household appliances (Haier, Midea) to emerging ones, mobile phone manufacturers (Xiaomi) and the original household cleaning robot manufacturers (Ecovacs, Proscenic, Fmart, ILIFE, iRobot) are collectively competing for this market. According to the statistical results of China Home Appliances Grid on the sweeping robot market in 2021, the market share of omni-channel sales in Ecovas is nearly 50%, which is in the first echelon. Xiaomi and Xiaomi Ecological Chain Enterprise Stone Technology are represented, which together account for about 22% of the domestic market share and rank in the second echelon; The third echelon is foreign-funded manufacturers, represented by iRobot and Proscenic, as well as Haier and Midea.
Sweeping robot market to upstream chip manufacturers bring room for development
Li Zhen, general manager of Allwinner Technology Pan-operator Customer Division, said: "We look at a consumer market, about 30 million units. We think it is a long-term stable market segment that can accommodate some chip manufacturers for long-term development."
"Sweeping robots were first launched by foreign manufacturers. As Chinese manufacturers made the intelligent sweeping robot market, the price was almost half that of foreign products, and the competitiveness of Chinese products in overseas markets was highlighted." Li Zhen analyzed, "The sweeping robot was originally a stand-alone intelligence. All algorithms were local. Later, it had WiFi function. After networking, it also made cameras and voices. It can do active perception, actively avoid obstacles, and then make the whole house intelligent. AIoT center."
The sweeping robot of T10 OMINI launched by Cobos adds automatic dust collection function on the basis of T10 TURBO, and "intelligent voice interaction" and "true AI sweeping and dragging" make many users feel that the experience is great value. You can call the sweeping robot by voice, tell the specific location, and let it automatically locate the area to clean through humanoid recognition and sound source localization technology.
At present, some enterprises have begun to make different attempts in binocular structured light, monocular structured light, ITOF, DTOF and other technologies to solve the obstacle avoidance requirements of sweeping robot products in different environments such as dark environment, white light environment and glass environment. From the cost point of view, binocular cost is the lowest, only two cameras are needed. The cost of structured light is relatively high.
In the realization of cleaning function of sweeping robot, obstacle avoidance and intelligence are two concerns. According to Li Zhen's analysis, most obstacles can't be avoided in traditional obstacle avoidance technology, and will be realized through collision. Camera plus deep learning in the future, we will make accurate judgments and avoid them effectively. The disadvantage of intelligence is that it needs a large computing power platform to identify obstacle avoidance; Second, the requirement for computing power is relatively high, so the intelligent cost is now higher than the non-intelligent cost.
Intelligent sweeping robot
In Li Zhen's view, the sweeper has spent a lot of energy on the algorithm, one is to identify and avoid obstacles, and then to facilitate the minimum path, and the other is to identify materials. The earliest SLAM of Allwinner Technology (i.e., synchronous positioning and map building) is a camera facing the ceiling, which is used to position the whole room. Nowadays, cameras are more security, AI object recognition and so on. Once the camera is head-up, the demand for computing power increases exponentially, so the head-up camera needs a large computing power NPU, and the memory requirement is also very large.
Li Zhen pointed out that Allwinner Technology entered the field of intelligent sweeping robots in 2016, and has been deeply cultivating this market by 2022, optimistic about the development prospects of this market. Allwinner Technology has launched four generations of chips in the sweeping robot market, latest the mainstream highly competitive processor MR813 is applied to the sweeping robot. This chip is a high-performance SOC, adopts a 4-core A53 architecture, has a main frequency of 1.6 GHz, and has rich audio and video interfaces and motion drive interfaces. MR813 chip of Allwinner Technology is adopted by Stone Technology's sweeping robot G10S, chasing S10, cloud whale 2 little beluga whale sweeping robot and Mijia all-round sweeping robot. Li Zhen revealed that the latest 828 being developed by Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd. will be released at the end of the year, and the computing power has been able to touch the highest-end computing power platform at present.
According to data, in the first half of 2022, the main sweeping robots released by Cobos, Xiaomi and Stone Technology showed three trends: First, visual sensors were widely used, and second, the suction of sweeping robots was significantly improved; Third, the application of dToF lidar has expanded. In the terminal application, the product and price combination of sweeping robot are becoming more and more reasonable, and the configuration combination of all-round, self-cleaning, self-dust collection, automatic water supply and drainage tends to be rich, and consumers' freedom of choice increases.
Sweeping robot market has broad prospects. Quan Zhi chips boost the growth of mainstream manufacturers-China exportsemi.com
