Despite the adverse effects of the epidemic, the Chinese industrial application mobile robot (AGV/AMR) market still maintains a high growth trend in 2022, especially in some innovative sub sectors where growth exceeded expectations.
According to the statistics of Wikipedia Robotics, the sales of mobile robots in the Chinese market in 2022 were approximately 87000 units, a year-on-year increase of 28.4%, and the market size was 11.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24.7%. It is expected that the Chinese mobile robot market will still maintain a growth rate of about 30% in 2023.
The development trend of mobile robots in China in 2022 is shifting from a slowdown at the beginning of the year to a rapid growth at the end of the year. From the perspective of application fields, there is significant growth in industries such as new energy vehicles, lithium batteries, and photovoltaics. These industries have large project scales and are replicable. With the accumulation of technical experience, the application scale will continue to grow.
In the field of new energy vehicle manufacturing, in recent years, with the rapid development of new energy vehicles, the intelligent upgrading of automobile production has become a trend in the entire industry, making mobile robots widely used. Mobile robots have been applied to logistics distribution in the four major production links of stamping, welding, painting, and final assembly, achieving operations such as small and large parts distribution, sorting parts online, and standard parts supply, replacing traditional trailer and manual handling.
In the field of lithium battery manufacturing, mobile robots have been involved in the coating, roll cutting, die-cutting, winding, cell assembly, and module PACK processes of lithium battery production, demonstrating intelligent, efficient, and flexible characteristics. They can automatically connect with machine equipment and effectively improve the automation level of logistics in the factory through algorithms such as pre scheduling, partition task management, and large-scale cluster scheduling, thereby improving on-site production efficiency and significantly reducing enterprise labor costs.
In the field of photovoltaic manufacturing, mobile robots are widely used in processes such as photovoltaic crystallization, slicing, battery cells, and components, achieving functions such as automatic material distribution, inter process transfer, line inventory management, and high-precision docking with machines. They replace manual labor to solve the handling difficulties of special materials such as overweight and fragile materials, meet the cleanliness requirements of the production workshop environment, and reduce EHS risks.
The upgrade of intelligent manufacturing is not simply about using robots instead of manual labor to produce products, but a complete set of different systems. The first step is to connect logistics, use mobile robots to transport various items, and physically connect various discrete systems. If manual labor is still used to maintain the flow of items, not only efficiency cannot keep up, but also smooth connection is difficult to ensure. With the advancement of intelligent manufacturing, The market demand for mobile robots will continue to expand in the future.
Continued Development of AGV/AMR Market
In the category of mobile robots, both AGV and AMR are continuously developing, but there are subtle differences in their application fields. AGV is mainly used in industries such as warehousing logistics, automotive manufacturing, 3C electronics, new energy, food and beverage, while AMR is mainly used in fields such as 3C electronics, automotive components, new energy, semiconductors, healthcare, logistics, etc. This is also determined by their respective characteristics.
AMR can automatically navigate without laying tracks in advance, and it is easy to expand and change work areas, making production more flexible and intelligent. Today, the market demand is increasingly refined, fragmentation, and diversified. Users have increasingly high requirements for the delivery cycle, which promotes enterprises to improve the capacity of production according to demand. In the face of the fast pace of flexible production, AMR has become the best choice for many enterprises.
However, both laser navigation and visual navigation currently have certain limitations and cannot be guaranteed to be applicable in all situations, especially in complex environments such as factories. Therefore, sometimes it is still necessary to arrange a small number of manual markers or add auxiliary navigation to achieve effective navigation operation. In the future, with the breakthrough of natural navigation technology, Only by addressing the adaptability issues in feature scarcity and high dynamic environments can AMR usher in a new round of explosive development.
AGV robots are limited to fixed routes and have a smaller application range due to the need to lay wires or magnetic strips as "tracks". However, AGV started earlier, the technology is more mature, and the cost is lower. In a more stable environment, it can effectively improve the level of automation, and overall, the cost-effectiveness is higher.
In recent years, some enterprises have also been exploring new development paths for AGVs, restructuring their form and function, breaking the original basic appearance structure in product design, and opening up a new stage of unmanned forklifts with new forms as the main focus. Currently, many AGVs are still transformed from traditional manual forklifts, retaining some unnecessary designs and limiting the development of AGVs. Therefore, it is necessary to create a new type of AGV form, Helps to open up new market space.