Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

In many films about aging society, Robot and Frank describes a near future scene-a robot with powerful intelligence, can talk to anyone fluently, can cook and clean up the house, and how to bridge the gap and live successfully with Frank, an old man with Alzheimer's disease.

The creator's optimism about the development prospect of artificial intelligence robot is obvious. with the popularization of artificial intelligence technology, robot also has the opportunity to really enter human life. In 2020, we not only see a significant increase in the number of robots in anti-epidemic, park, industry and other fields, but also more and more robots appear in new application fields. With labor shortage and rising costs, the Chinese market, which is about to end the era of demographic dividend, will also follow Japan, Germany and other developed countries to usher in the rapid development of robot density. And this is the social background in which robots help various industries to achieve growth.

Corresponding to the booming industry trend, more and more people are soberly aware that due to technological bottlenecks, the AI robot with independent thinking and human feelings in the film is still out of reach.

In Chinese society, for example, the number of people over the age of 65 reached 7% in 2019, marking that we will officially enter an aging society in this century. How to solve the social problems brought about by this, such as the problem of care for the newly added elderly? How to solve the shortage of industrial labor? Naturally, new business opportunities are also brewing. All kinds of old-age and service-oriented robots emerge as the times require, playing together the prelude of man-machine symbiosis of the aging earth.

The participation of the power of industry becomes very meaningful at this time. The reason for this feeling is that I happened to listen to an industrial AI open course on JD.com 's mathematics, which is on the theme of "how the aging society will promote the change of AI robots" to explore the possibility of seeking breakthroughs with AI robots.

We have discussed the impact and value of AI agents on business society, so it is worth thinking about what thresholds AI agents need to cross to reach human well-being and what kind of industrial power to participate in the longer-term social needs.

"Social Robot" VS "Social Machine", Human-computer Coupling in the Aging era

Know history to learn from, look up the past to know the present. This is especially true for huge social issues such as aging.

Therefore, before discussing specific products and functions, it is necessary to briefly understand what kind of ideas are used to lead the development of AI robots in this wave of artificial intelligence development and revival.

To put it simply, there are two ways to solve problems-"social robot" and "social machine".

The so-called "social robot" program, through a variety of anthropomorphic social robots Social Robots, can participate in all aspects of human life and interact with people and the environment independently. For example, Leonardo (which looks like ordinary plush toys) with the ability of expression and social direction, KASPAR (a doll used for auxiliary treatment of autism) that can make expressions, and Kodomoroid, a highly simulated humanoid teenage robot, Pepper, developed by Softbank Corp., which can communicate with the elderly, as well as Keecker and Buddy in France, and Ubixuan robots in China, provide life services and emotional companionship for human beings.

The "social machine" scheme stems from the view of artificial intelligence expert James Hendler (James Hendler), the father of the semantic Web, that is, a large-scale machine-assisted collaborative system in which machines do tedious and routine "management" tasks, while people provide creative wisdom. Specific to the field of providing for the aged, it does not reproduce the human form from the appearance, because it is extremely inefficient, but in the process of social intelligence, it focuses on using robot technology to transform the social cooperation network.

Which route can help human beings use machine intelligence to deal with an aging society?

As we all know, the last "cold winter" of artificial intelligence was due to the impractical technological imagination and the excessive pursuit of "strong artificial intelligence" to reproduce human intelligence, which led to engineering difficulties, and finally the bubble burst in 1974. Today, humanoid robots are facing the same situation, and it is very difficult to realize humanoid machines with high intelligence, independent decision-making and generalization of skills. For example, CEO Zhou Jian, who is selected by the domestic robot manufacturer Youbixuan, said frankly that it is more difficult to achieve a humanoid robot like the "Western World" within 10 years.

Obviously, a huge social cooperation network can better cope with the challenge of aging than using a single machine and a single algorithm to depict intelligence.

To put it simply, it is the pursuit of "achieving" intelligence, such as achieving human visual effects through computer vision. In order for machines to help humans solve problems, humans need to work with machines. Although man-machine coupling does not sound as postmodern as science fiction movies, it has the potential to become the technological mainstay of "new infrastructure" and has high hopes.

From individual to Society: what kind of machines are needed in the Aging Society

The "social machine" with stronger engineering ability is more feasible in solving the aging crisis than the single humanoid intelligent robot. However, in the face of a wide variety of machine products, which really meet the actual needs, we need to consider.

After a brief comb, the social machines in the context of providing for the aged can be divided into three types:

1. Life assistant. That is to say, for the care tools for the elderly, many elderly people who live alone find it difficult to live independently. Accompanying robots include humanoid robots, such as Japanese robot bears, which can easily pick up the elderly; there are also cooperative robots like robotic arms and exoskeletons, which mainly play the role of "human body enhancement" to help the elderly increase certain functions and carry out activities more independently.

two。 Emotional companionship. Compared with life problems, the lonely emotional state of the elderly is also worthy of attention. Most emotional companion robots, such as Paro, Zora, Pepper, etc., are designed to mimic human beings and interact with each other. Another translation of Robot and Frank, "True partner", also implies that approaching the elderly with an anthropomorphic image can indeed have a comforting effect. But just like Frank's extreme aversion to robots at the beginning of the movie, how to solve the "Horror Valley effect" is still waiting for manufacturers to iterate themselves.

3. Efficiency tools. The most important derivative problem of aging is the shortage of young workers. Improving social productivity as a whole and achieving stable wealth growth is an important guarantee for social operation and the quality of life of the elderly. Therefore, robots that can achieve automation and intelligence in industrial production and other infrastructure services also have great commercial prospects. This kind of products, such as industrial manipulators, service robots, inspection robots and so on.

In fact, what important technical capabilities the above-mentioned robots need have already emerged in the current exploration.

1. Real-time accurate perception and operation ability, instead of manual work.

Take Japan, where the aging problem is very serious, for example, due to the low wages and excessive labor intensity of the caregivers in most pension institutions, Japanese young people are unwilling to engage in this kind of work, and the introduction of foreign workers is faced with a series of social problems. as a result, there are problems such as poor service quality.

How to make intelligent machines replace human beings to complete some boring, repetitive and high physical work has become the direction that robot manufacturers must strive to reach.

Among the most influential robot companies in the world, most of them are collaborative robots. For example, Aethon, a supplier of autonomous mobile transport robots, can complete transportation tasks in a variety of business environments, including manufacturing factories, hospitals and so on.

Google and Foxconn have teamed up to build industrial robots, which has also sparked discussion in the industry. Amazon Robot, founded in 2003, has become a model for robots to reduce the intensity of manual labor in e-commerce.

China will also face such problems. Take the heavy labor-intensive railway inspection as an example, the content is boring, and the working environment in many areas such as the Sichuan-Tibet line is also relatively dangerous and not suitable for manual work. As a result, more and more young people are unwilling to use it as a career choice, and this generation of industrial workers will inevitably face the problem of no one to replace when they retire.

Therefore, large domestic technology enterprises and vertical robot manufacturers are also constantly gnawing down the "hard bones". JD.com Mathematical Science, for example, has launched a railway patrol robot to replace the traditional manual inspection in the field of "iron machine", which is difficult to attract young people. Through the integration of machine learning, data and cloud computing, the use of laser, radar and other sensor technologies to achieve mapping-level detection accuracy and improve operation efficiency.

The exploration of these robot enterprises has only one purpose, that is, to protect the efficient productivity in the aging society.

(railway Patrol AI Robot independently developed by JD.com)

two。 Personalized crowd-oriented service ability.

Some people will say that compared with mechanized engineering robots, humanoid chat robots are easier to get closer to the crowd and can better complete humanized services such as accompanying the elderly and children.

As netizens can think of, many pioneer enterprises have thought of it and put it into practice. For example, Softbank Corp. and Boston Dynamics have invested a lot of money and money in humanoid robots, but the ideal is very full, and the reality is very cruel.

The Pepper robot, launched by Softbank Corp. in 2015, believes that there are too few apps available to meet the needs of human-computer communication. Some assisted care robots, such as Sasuke, which helps people stand and change seats, are also reduced to furnishings because of complicated operating procedures and restrictions on users' weight and physical status.

The Boston-powered robot stunned and shocked the world at its first shot, but the only Spot robot on sale offered $74500 (about 526000 yuan), which made me shed tears from the poor.

(Boston-powered quadruped robot Spot is patrolling the rig.)

Obviously, the service robot to enter the homes of ordinary people, in line with the actual needs of ordinary people, function, interaction, performance-to-price ratio and so on are the threshold that manufacturers need to cross.

Under the premise of cost control, customizing the service robot into the roles of friends and spouses of the elderly to achieve personalized oriented service and enhance the application value of the AI robot has become the imaginative and hard-working direction of the whole industry.

Obviously, such a thousand-person service needs not only the blessing of B-side engineering ability, but also the C-side individual big data to train personalized algorithm to achieve the interaction effect close to the individual.

From this point of view, JD.com 's business service robot "Xiaoke" also has a unique advantage. JD.com Mathematical Science enables multimodal human-computer interaction to be customized according to the personal needs of users through image recognition, voice intelligent dialogue, data acquisition, etc., and realizes more accurate entertainment interaction. It has completed the technical exercise for the service robot to really enter the human life.

(commercial server AI robot independently developed by JD.com Mathematical Science)

3. Energy efficiency ratio of industrial application deployment.

Even if there are "financier dads" willing to spend a lot of money to introduce cool super robots like Altas, Boston Power's robots that can run and flip can take years from production to application, which obviously cannot meet the needs of large-scale deployment in the industry.

For example, according to IDC, there were only 500000 data centers in the world in 2012, compared with 8 million today. Among them, very large-scale data centers are even more numerous, which generally have 50-100000 servers. To maintain such a large-scale computer room, if all the operation and maintenance personnel are replaced with robots like Altas, there is no doubt that the cost and time limit can be consumed.

Therefore, the advantages of the industrial service inspection robot, which can meet the inspection needs of the data center, reduce less inspection, missed detection, false detection, and reduce the labor intensity of technicians, are obvious.

Take the highly acclaimed JD.com digital computer room inspection robot as an example, it can complete the inspection of a single cabinet within 30 seconds, the detection accuracy is more than 98%, and the accuracy error of SLAM autonomous navigation is less than 20 mm. It can reduce the operation and maintenance cost of the computer room in the data center by 50% every year, and has been deployed in the data center of large state-owned commercial banks.

(computer Room Patrol AI Robot independently developed by JD.com)

Practical, practical, this cost, efficiency advantages, may be the AI robot to open the industrial rich mining map of the real password.

In the changing times of man-machine symbiosis, how does JD.com open up an industrial channel for mathematics?

From the pension scene to thousands of industries, we find that the battlefield of the AI robot industry is not simple.

The cutting-edge discussion of JD.com 's mathematics has explained at least three problems:

First of all, the research and development of robot technology must closely follow the trend and the needs of the industry, and return to the development concept of use value. The lesson of Japanese old-age robot exploration tells us that the full communication and design between robot manufacturers and pension centers can give full play to the best effect of machine intelligence.

In front of this industry AI open course, "can AI give birth to the" post-wave "era of robots?" Cao Peng, vice president of JD.com, also mentioned that solving the pain point of a specific scene alone is of limited significance to improve the efficiency of the whole industry. Through the continuous training of the basic capabilities of the existing AI robot products, it will be opened to various industry segments and small and medium-sized enterprises. In order to help intelligent technology to land faster and better in the field of subdivision.

In the case of old-age robots, JD.com Digital, which is concerned about the aging trend, enables more robot enterprises and pension service institutions to participate in it through the aggregation of resources in the industrial chain, using JD.com 's open technical capabilities to create products that meet specific needs. It also makes the concept of symbiosis and co-prosperity of the intelligent pension industry become a unique way to solve the problem for China to deal with the aging society.

Secondly, pay attention to the training and precipitation of the underlying technology.

As we all know, strong artificial intelligence is the ultimate goal of AI, but how AI robots go to the real world step by step cannot replicate "human intelligence" overnight. As far as escort robot products are concerned, in order to serve the elderly safely, reliably and efficiently, compared with simply paying attention to personification in appearance, what is more important is the technical capabilities of underlying natural language processing, multimodal interaction and so on. as well as servo motors, high-performance sensors and other highly sophisticated components, efficient and reliable remote communication, motion navigation and other professional software system development, which need to be rooted in pragmatic accumulation and research and development.

Obviously, science and technology enterprises trying to build a basic capability platform should naturally have sufficient leadership and voice in the underlying technology, which is also an important direction of JD.com in the field of robotics.

Finally, the reason why JD.com 's AI robot can fit the industry and land quickly is that there are JD.com 's unique business conditions and the scene penetration ability of digital upgrade. Through the business layout in AI technology, smart city, digital marketing, financial technology and other fields, JD.com Mathematical Science continues to accumulate standardized products and services, and then with the help of its own scene penetration capabilities, it also provides basic benefits for the intelligent product innovation of the entire pension industry.

In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, the "father of the Internet" and Turing Award winner, first put forward the concept of "social machine".

As more and more machines participate in daily life and become an integral part of society, scholars are constantly exploring the ways in which human beings get along with machines. So James Hendler (James Hendler), the father of the semantic Web, uses the book Social Machine to explain the new "man-machine relationship" after the fusion of artificial intelligence and social networks.

According to the China Robot Industry Development report 2019, the average growth rate of the global robot market from 2014 to 2019 is about 12.3%, and the market size is expected to reach 29.41 billion US dollars. China's service robot is developing at a much faster rate than the global level, with an increase of about 33.1% over the same period last year.

Solid data, and the continuous exploration of academia and industry, all point to an answer-that is, pension and even the upgrading and reform of various industries can not be separated from the effective support of AI robots. The opening of the marketization of To B field will make AI robots bring new breakthroughs for industrial problems. With the arrival of the aging era, there is no doubt that the development of AI robot industry has been pushed to the national strategic level. Seizing the commanding heights of the new round of intelligent revolution will also enable powerful AI robot manufacturers, as well as physical enterprises that really make good use of robots in the industrial scene, to achieve unlimited exponential growth.

Compared with the technological show-off and commercial gimmicks of humanoid robots, industrial service-oriented AI robots are gathering on a larger area of industrial land, waiting for the hard work of JD.com 's math students, and a bumper harvest that will benefit all mankind.

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