On the production line of the modern factory workshop, everything is going on in an orderly manner: mobile robots flexibly avoid obstacles and carry materials; quality inspection robots "meticulously" check product defects and defects, even traces as thin as hair; arc welding robots Proficiency in welding auto parts...
In the past, the production work in many industries was mainly completed by manpower. Nowadays, most industries prefer to choose robots to execute the workflow. Behind the precise and flexible operation, the help of machine vision is inseparable. It is the key to realize industrial intelligence and dataization.
As the machine vision industry is becoming more and more mature, the investment enthusiasm for the field of machine vision in the capital market continues to rise, and mergers and acquisitions and financing activities continue.
Recently, Ruitu Intelligent, a machine vision product provider in Changsha, Hunan Province, announced that it has obtained the Pre-A round of strategic investment from the A-share listed company "Kelai Electromechanical". It is worth mentioning that this is also a new round of financing after Ruitu Intelligent received the angel round investment led by Professor Li Zexiang.
As an important node city of China's "Belt and Road" strategy and the central city of the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, Changsha is striving to build a national intelligent manufacturing center. As a local enterprise in Changsha, Ruitu Intelligence benefits from Changsha's good business environment and strong efforts Entrepreneurship policy is growing rapidly.
With the support of funds and policies, what is the development of Ruitu Intelligence? How should we view the future direction of the machine vision track?
Machine vision "out of the circle"
In the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, ice and snow athletes from all over the world will gather here. Beijing is not only a venue to show competitive strength and sportsmanship, but also a stage to show Chinese-style romance and passion to the world.
In the Winter Olympics, there is not only the display of "Chinese style", but also the blessing of "sense of technology". The opening ceremony was ethereal and romantic, stunning the audience, and the modern technology contained in it allowed the stage to be presented to the maximum extent. Throughout the Winter Olympics schedule, each competition venue embodies the integration of traditional aesthetics and cutting-edge technology.
In the passionate speed skating competition, the highest speed of athletes reaches 15-18 meters per second, which is about 50 kilometers per hour, and the top athletes can reach 70 kilometers per hour. Every athlete is inseparable from the help of a machine vision system called "Cheetah" when performing high-speed sports and maintaining a clear picture.
In fact, machine vision is an emerging technology and industry, and it is one of the core technologies of Industry 4.0. Although the development time is relatively short, the machine vision industry has achieved rapid development on a global scale, relying on the speed of technological innovation and the favorable situation of industrial development.
According to MarketsandMarkets statistics, the global machine vision market continued to expand from 2016 to 2019, reaching US$10.2 billion in 2019, exceeding US$10 billion. In 2020, affected by the epidemic, the market size will drop to US$9.6 billion. It is estimated that the global machine vision market will exceed US$13 billion by 2025; it will be close to US$14 billion by 2026.
From the perspective of regional distribution, Europe currently has the largest market share in the global machine vision market, accounting for 36.4%; followed by North America, accounting for 29.3%; the Asia-Pacific region has developed rapidly in recent years, and its market share has grown rapidly, reaching 25.3% in 2019 %.
In recent years, with the advancement of China's industrialization process, domestic policy documents have been issued to promote the development of intelligent manufacturing, intelligent robot vision systems and intelligent detection. Driven by many favorable factors, China's machine vision industry has ushered in a booming development. According to the forecast of GGII, the domestic machine vision market will reach 20.86 billion yuan by 2023.
However, the development history of machine vision in the world is only more than half a century, while the development history of the domestic machine vision industry is even shorter. In the past ten years, with the development of the domestic economy and the progress of the industrial level, manufacturing companies are eager to improve production efficiency and meet the needs of expansion. Under this thirst, the local machine vision industry has risen rapidly and entered a stage of rapid development.
The technology industry has always been the darling of investment institutions, and machine vision is a representative of emerging technologies. With the update and iteration of related industries such as robots, semiconductors, and electronic appliances, the huge application market and commercial operation of machine vision have attracted a lot of capital attention and investment.
According to IT Juzi data, from 2013 to 2020, the domestic machine vision-related financing volume showed an overall growth trend. In 2020, a total of 58 cases occurred, with a total investment amount of 10.9 billion yuan; A total of 78 incidents occurred, with a total investment of 18.3 billion yuan, the highest in history.
It can be said that, as a member of the machine vision track, Ruitu Intelligent is also equipped with industry trends to a certain extent.
Grasp the opportunities of the times
Founded in 2016, Ruitu Intelligent is a national high-tech enterprise that takes machine vision, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing as its core technologies, and continues to promote product research and development in the fields of intelligent robots, Internet of Things, 5G, and edge computing.
Since its establishment, it has been focusing on the R&D, production, and sales of machine vision products, and has continuously launched key technologies and products integrating software, hardware, and algorithms in vertical fields, which are important supports for smart logistics, smart manufacturing, and smart medical fields.
From the product point of view, Ruitu Intelligent mainly provides a series of products based on edge intelligence and cloud-edge collaboration, and launches different machine vision systems for different needs, including character detection and recognition systems (OCR), logistics visual recognition systems, and 3D visual inspections system etc. Product functions cover product and target recognition, 3D inspection and measurement, surface defect detection, etc.
At present, the company has image processing and deep learning software algorithm platform with independent intellectual property rights, logistics identification products, 3D visual identification products, surface visual inspection solutions and other product systems, which are applied to more than 2,000 leading enterprises in the industry; at the same time, it cooperates with listed companies Develop multiple sets of industry-standardized products to lower the threshold for intelligent transformation and upgrading of enterprises.
Core technologies include machine vision, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing, and ultimately provide overall machine vision solutions. Compared with market competitors, the most attractive part of the machine vision system provided by Ruitu Intelligent is mainly the product integrating software, hardware and algorithm. The deep learning algorithm of Ruitu Intelligent can improve the processing ability of enterprises in complex environments under flexible manufacturing, and can better realize high-precision automatic calibration and fast and accurate positioning of objects.
In addition, Ruitu intelligent product system has built-in trajectory planning, collision detection, logic checking and other advanced algorithms to help the machine choose the optimal route and avoid problems such as mistakes. The ideal state is to quickly identify objects through the visual system, and through Deep learning optical flow speed measurement optimizes the state space model, performs optimal control and optimal estimation, and obtains a relatively stable trajectory, thereby realizing rapid action execution, but it is inevitable that there will still be deviations in accuracy and precision.
With its own relatively complete software and hardware systems and algorithms, Ruitu Intelligent's machine vision system has greatly improved its adaptability to various scenarios.
For example, in July 2020, Ruitu Intelligent launched the Ruitu Intelligent Settlement Meal Table, which introduced artificial intelligence and machine vision technology into the field of group meals, using image recognition algorithms to realize automatic settlement, and the recognition rate basically reached 100%.
In December 2021, Ruitu Intelligent launched the Rmix character detection and recognition system. This system does not require personnel to debug, and is suitable for various application scenarios with ultra-high speed, complex background, and fast packaging replacement. It has the characteristics of simple operation, strong anti-interference, high accuracy, and strong self-learning ability. At present, the system has helped hundreds of well-known food, pharmaceutical, and daily necessities companies such as Mengniu, Qiaqia, Taste King, and Yangzijiang Pharmaceuticals achieve multiple increases in production line efficiency.
The market is still in the cultivation stage and the attractive economic returns are superimposed, which brings machine vision to the wind of capital.
Potential and competition still coexist
From the market point of view, due to the increasingly ideal return on investment of machine vision systems and the gradual increase in market demand, Ruitu Intelligent, which focuses on this field, can also taste market dividends.
Machine vision can replace human eyes to achieve multiple functions in various scenarios, such as reading two-dimensional codes, determining the assembly position of parts, etc., so it will be promising in more application fields.
For example, PCB defect detection is mainly composed of two parts: solder joint defect detection and component detection. The traditional manual visual inspection method is prone to missed inspection, slow speed, long time and high cost, while the machine vision system can directly find the existing defects after the printing operation, which can effectively prevent defective circuit boards from being delivered to the back end of the production line , so as to avoid the phenomenon of rework or scrap.
However, from the perspective of competing companies, there are quite a few companies that have set foot in this field. Representative companies in the upstream hardware of the domestic machine vision industry include OFILM, Chengrui Optics, Hikvision Robotics, Dahua Technology, Han’s Laser, Optics, and Vision Image, Lingyunguang, Zhuoxin Chuangchi, Delta Electronics, ZTE Microelectronics, Beijing Junzheng, etc.; representative software companies include Lingyun Electronics, Shenzhen Keda, SenseTime, and Yuncong Technology. Figure Smart's competitor.
At present, due to the relatively high understanding and adaptability of the machine vision system of Ruitu Intelligent, the product's cost performance and stability are relatively superior, and it has been used in many industries such as food and drug, beverage, ore, construction, aerospace, biomedicine, etc. Cooperating with more than 300 companies such as China Tobacco, CRRC, Lens Technology, and Laoganma, this wide range of application scenarios has also become the largest "moat" for Ruitu Intelligence.
In recent years, as China's manufacturing is being upgraded to "China's smart manufacturing", machine vision is playing an increasingly important role. The innovation of machine vision technology is constantly accelerating industrial digitization, and also accelerating the market's demand for customization and personalization. The continuous growth of demand has prompted manufacturers to transform from standardized production to flexible manufacturing, making machine vision systems more and more companies and capital. More time to verify.
Source: New Industry Insights