How can 3D vision manufacturers blessed by foreign genes survive in the domestic market?
July 19th, 2021
Benefiting from the continuous expansion of the overall scale of the manufacturing industry, the continuous improvement of the level of intelligence, and favorable national policies, the scale of China's machine vision market has continued to expand. According to the research report of the Advanced Robotics Industry Research Institute (GGII), the machine vision fever will continue in 2021 and will continue to grow at a rate of 20%-30%. By 2023, the machine vision market is expected to reach 15.56 billion yuan.
According to Sam Shufan Yu, the sales director of SCAPE, in an interview with GG Robot, that 3D vision is currently in a booming period and the market is hot. The participation of upstream parts companies and the activity of capital have changed significantly compared with last year. "As more and more players flock to the 3D visual track, it will intensify the formation of the head enterprise. At the same time, the market size and industry application of 3D vision will achieve further breakthroughs."
In fact, since the advent of 3D vision, batch applications have been realized in some areas. For example, in the fields of automobile production and parts processing, 3D vision combined with robots are used in positioning guidance, parts operations (bin picking, machine loading and unloading, Trajectory correction, destacking, packaging, assembly, etc.); and in 3C, new energy, food and beverage, medical and other fields, 3D vision is gradually infiltrating quality control, inspection and other links.
Nowadays, this "potential stock" is ushering in the competition of capital. According to incomplete statistics from GG Robot, there were 14 financing incidents in the 3D vision field in the first half of 2021, of which 6 were over 100 million financing.
Faced with the enthusiasm of capital, Sam Shufan Yu believes that the frequent entry of capital can bring higher attention to the industry, thus promoting technological innovation, project research and development and implementation. To some extent, the 3D vision market is still in a "frontier" phase, and capital can provide companies with the opportunity and cost of trial and error along the technological route.
For the 15-year-old SCAPE with foreign genes, how to speed up the development in the domestic market, SCAPE has its own business logic.
SCAPE’s domestic and foreign business integration
Earlier, Maxonic issued an announcement that according to the company’s subsidiary Scape Technologies A/S ("Scape") product development progress and funding requirements, combined with the company's strategic development plan, it is proposed to be the company's wholly-owned subsidiary Hong Kong Maxonic increased its capital to Scape by 10 million Danish kroner (approximately RMB 10.3 million at the spot exchange rate), which is the third capital increase in the past year.
Sam Shufan Yu said that Europe and China are the two main battlefields of SCAPE. At present, for the domestic market, the Group’s R&D investment has been fully shifted to the domestic market, and at the same time, it has further strengthened the satisfaction of the market, decision-making, and capital needs of SCAPE.
Sam Shufan Yu believes that foreign companies want to enter the Chinese market and take root in China. Establishing joint ventures locally is one of the few ways to quickly integrate into the local market and adapt to the local market. Yu Shufan further pointed out that domestic manufacturers pay attention to the rapid implementation of scenarios, specific application scenarios, rapid iteration to meet customers, service and response speed are advantages. The advantages of foreign-funded enterprises are reflected in technological precipitation, accurate landing, stable products, and certain first-mover advantages.
"Foreign companies pay attention to precision and detail, domestic companies pay attention to large and comprehensive, although the domestic market is large, but not necessarily fully suitable for foreign-funded enterprises." Sam Shufan Yu said.
Based on this, SCAPE, which has both domestic and overseas genes, will fully integrate the deep overseas 3D vision, robotics technology and ontology service capabilities, look for differentiated and segmented scenes guided by market demand, accelerate the implementation of technology, and meet customer flexibility and intelligence Production needs.
"Over the years, we have developed and continuously improved a complete solution that is extensible, flexible, and reliable at its core. In this way, we have solved a number of demanding tasks for our customers in Europe and China. Since the first delivery of the system to our customers, we have realized that the reliability of the solution is not just about 3D scanning. As a result, we are helping our customers achieve a complete, 24/7 solution that meets their expectations and stringent requirements, helping us gain even more valuable knowledge and experience to capture more and better markets."
Choice logic in industry and logistics
It can be said that on the way from budding to flowering of a new technology, challenges and opportunities always coexist. Quickly finding the corresponding application scenarios is undoubtedly the key to gaining ground in the 3D vision technology market. At the same time, because robot intelligence has been widely recognized in the industry, as the eyes of robots, 3D vision will have more possibilities.
Sam Shufan Yu believes that the combination of robots and 3D vision will be the trend of the industry.
In the industrial field, the application of robots has been very extensive. The installation of vision for auxiliary operations does not require too much modification of the original production line. More requirements are customization, which perfectly fits the advantages of the current domestic 3D vision manufacturers based on the domestic market.
After 15 years of experience, SCAPE understands the importance of application scenes, and takes industrial scenes as the target to enter the 3D market.
Taking the standardized industrial solution-"SCAPE Bin-Picking Solution" as an example, a series of processes such as Recognition, Robot motion Planning, Gripping, Precision deliveries.
Sam Shufan Yu said that the core solutions of SCAPE mainly come from vision algorithms, motion trajectory control, and overall solutions.
Specifically, in industrial scenarios, there are many and complex technological processes, and the following core concepts are kept in mind at each stage of SCAPE product design:
Must be able to deal with the fundamental problems of the system;
• The SCAPE system must have good robustness;
• The SCAPE system must be easy to use;
• The SCAPE system must be applicable to multiple brands of robots;
• The SCAPE system must be reconfigurable to meet most needs;
• The SCAPE system must be universal;
At the Productronica China in 2021, SCAPE demonstrated the case application of SCAPE Bin-Picking solution in the sheet metal processing link of the automotive industry and the loading and unloading of steering bracket machine tools. It has been successfully applied to many auto industry giants such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Honda, and Tesla.
At the same time, due to the continuous expansion of the application scenarios of 3D vision, it has derived a completely different application field from the industry -- logistics scene.
In the field of logistics, in addition to saving labor costs, it also faces problems such as warehousing, handling, and sorting. 3D vision technology is applied in the sorting process, and the market has relatively broad space. At present, the robot plus vision system is a single-station optimization system in logistics, and what it can do is to save labor costs. Only by introducing vision from the process and flow really efficiently, can there be more development opportunities for 3D vision.
Based on this, SCAPE combined with SCAPE AI+3D vision+robot core technology to develop multiple application scenarios such as depalletizing, material supplying, material sorting, and material catering.
"Scape uses the advantages of technology and the world's leading solutions to meet the needs of users in the industrial system and logistics system. This is the value of Vision Science, and it is also our confident commitment." Sam Shufan Yu said.
Sam Shufan Yu said that compared with the technical barriers of robots in the terminal part, the technical barriers of 3D vision are not high and the difficulty is relatively easy, so more and more players will participate. Sam Shufan Yu emphasized that the 3D vision market is showing a rising trend to encourage more players to participate in it, and accelerate the industry to break through the short-term bottleneck.
It is worth noting that although 3D vision is widely used in industry and logistics, the penetration rate of 3D vision is also different due to different industry characteristics.
"At present, the 3D visual penetration rate of industry is greater than the 3D visual penetration rate of logistics, which is related to the degree of development of the two."
Sam Shufan Yu further explained that the development of the industry is relatively long, and many problems have been solved in the process of development. For the remaining few problems, existing solutions include visual and other flexible solutions in addition to traditional mechanical structures. On the contrary, the logistics industry may still have the problem of artificial competition, and it still needs time to test whether it can penetrate in terms of efficiency and price. In such a case, the penetration rate of industry is naturally greater than that of logistics.
At present, the field of 3D vision is still in the stagnant stage, and there have not been any leading companies, and price involution struggles are frequently staged, disturbing the lake of 3D vision. In Sam Shufan Yu 's view, when the quantity of 3D vision changes to a qualitative change, and the scale effect appears, more players will enter the market segment. The upstream and downstream industries will also be clearer.
Sam Shufan Yu believes that “in the future, more, newer and more suitable technologies will emerge to help reshape the market structure of 3D vision and gradually enter a new stage of qualitative change.”
