EFORT once used controllers from KEBA, Nachi, Kawasaki, Googol and several other manufacturers, but never had a self-developed controller product. Now EFORT can finally hold the controller — the core component of industrial robots — in its own hands.
Estun, another major domestic industrial robot manufacturer, moved even earlier, announcing at the beginning of 2017 that it had acquired the renowned British TRIO. Estun has long used KEBA controllers or motion platforms developed on top of KW. In the future, Estun will use TRIO's core.
Besides the "Two Es", Shanghai STEP has successively acquired controller manufacturers such as Zhongweixing and Zhishan Smart Control to build its own motion control products, replacing the KEBA/B&R products it used early on.
Even earlier, Midea acquired KUKA and ServoTronic.
Acquisition has become a keyword in the industrial robot industry!
Judging from current market trends, all first-tier domestic industrial robot manufacturers have completed their layouts for independent controller R&D and production.
By contrast, foreign robot giants such as ABB and KUKA all treat controller technology as core and keep it firmly in their own hands.
As the brain of the industrial robot, the controller determines the robot's "intelligence". Over the past two decades, robots have seen no essential improvement in mechanical structure, but control technology — following the development of semiconductors, networks, software and other industries — has increasingly taken on intelligent and networked characteristics. The progress of the industrial robot industry is mainly the progress of controllers.
Robot control technology involves multiple disciplines including mechanics, electrical engineering, communications, computers and software, and is extremely complex. Today's real-time bus technology can push the robot control cycle to the 125 us level, with more than 128 parallel motion axes. Multi-arm redundant robots and machine vision technology have raised the complexity of motion planning algorithms by several orders of magnitude. The lack of basic research in motion control and computing platforms in China severely restricts the development of robot controllers.
The state once invested huge funds through the "04 Special Project" to improve the R&D level of domestic CNC machine tool systems, but today the mid-to-high-end CNC machine tool market is still monopolized by Siemens and Fanuc. Robot system R&D receives far less time and money, so domestic robots today have to face the reality of being "brainless".
Now several first-tier manufacturers have made up for this shortcoming by acquiring "outside brains". But we should recognize that whether TRIO or ROBOX, they still lag far behind ABB and others in robot control. We haven't yet stood on the shoulders of giants — yet we have to face the giants' competition? Can this path work?
China's robot industry has a thin foundation but enormous market space. China is already the world's largest robot market. Imported robots lead in technology, but they are helpless against China's vast number of "low-end" manufacturing industries. Neither price, process nor service levels can meet the needs of China's many small and medium-sized manufacturers.
The future of Chinese robots depends precisely on these SMEs. Whoever can help SMEs complete the upgrade to smart manufacturing will win the future. This requires robot manufacturers to focus more on SMEs and solve practical problems at reasonable cost, rather than one-sidedly promoting high-flying technical solutions. From this perspective, domestic industrial robot manufacturers should digest control technology as quickly as possible, improve process application levels, and launch cost-effective robots suited to the Chinese market.
