The humanoid robot danced on the Spring Festival Gala, which became a hot topic of discussion, and caused many people to sigh: the stage of humanoid robots finally came out of the car-making workshop!
Looking back on the past, from the Optimus launched by Tesla, to the third-generation embodied intelligent humanoid robot GoMate released by GAC Group, and then to the "Iron Allen" of Xpeng Motors, humanoid robots in the public eye have always been the first to "take up posts" in car companies. Why are car companies the first and most cross-border to enter the field of humanoid robots? The Chuanguan Think Tank summarized authoritative reports and public reports to attribute the main reasons to three aspects.
From a technical point of view, the threshold for car companies to enter the humanoid robot track is lower. There are many similarities between building a car and building a humanoid robot at the technical level. The capabilities of precision mechanical control, three-dimensional environment perception, and real-time decision-making algorithms accumulated by car companies have a high degree of technical overlap with the dynamic modeling, sensor fusion, and embedded systems developed by humanoid robots. The homology of this technology enables car companies to use the existing R&D team and technology accumulation to reduce the technical threshold and R&D cost to enter the field of humanoid robots.
From the perspective of supply chain, car companies have a complete supply chain system and rich experience, and have obvious first-mover advantages in building a supply chain for humanoid robot parts. On the one hand, the hardware reusability is strong, and the technology of some parts of the vehicle end and the humanoid robot is homologous, and the differences between the parts used are small. On the other hand, the automotive supply chain has experience in large-scale automated production, as well as relatively mature manufacturing capabilities and faster response speed, which is expected to help humanoid robots reduce costs in mass production.
From the perspective of market expansion, car companies need to seize the growth window of the humanoid robot market and open up a new growth curve. The humanoid robot market has broad prospects. Citigroup predicts that by 2050, the global humanoid robot market will reach 7 trillion US dollars, and the number of humanoid robots in the world will reach 648 million, about half of the current global car ownership. There is a gap between manpower supply and demand in China, and humanoid robots are a key part of alleviating the contradiction between manpower supply and demand in the manufacturing industry. The "2025 Blue Book on the Development of Chinese Human Robot Industry" released by the Prospective Industry Research Institute pointed out that China's labor supply gap will be 6 million in 2025 and will reach 20 million in 2030. Therefore, the Chinese humanoid robot market shows huge growth potential, according to the information disclosed by the Chinese humanoid robot industry conference, the compound annual growth rate of the Chinese humanoid robot market will reach 93.6% from 2024 to 2029. Car companies will inevitably be able to build a new growth curve for enterprises and provide strong support for future strategic transformation by cutting into the humanoid robot track with demand, high growth and huge market scale.
Humanoid robots still face problems such as technical bottlenecks, cost difficulties and unclear demand. However, industry insiders believe that the commonality of the current unsuccessful commercialization of humanoid robots is often to pay too much attention to technology iteration and ignore the feasibility of commercialization. In this regard, car companies with strong autonomous driving capabilities have more potential to break the situation, because car companies can better take into account technology iteration and the commercialization logic of product and market matching, and at the same time, car companies have more advantages in systematic cost reduction.