ECOVACS ROBOTICS Unveils Significant Breakthrough at 2022 Global Product Launch Event, Aiming for a Broader Robotics Market
- Written by The Chronicle
It's the first time for the company to hold a launch event in both Chinese and English facing audience around the world simultaneously, aiming to present a brand-new ECOVACS oriented towards future.
Meet a Brand-new ECOVACS Robotics
Through high-tech settings, ECOVACS brought an immersive event to reveal its milestone. Guided by David Qian, Chief Executive Officer of ECOVACS ROBOTICS, the audience experienced a tour throughout a futuristic ECOVACS Pavilion, a European garden and the Suzhou Museum, along with the new signature products applied at such scenes.
Last year, ECOVACS kicked off the Phase 3.0 era of home service robots through significantly improving their competence, intelligence and interactive performance by introducing DEEBOT X1 Family. This year, the company took another leap forward and achieved robotic application breakthroughs across lifestyle and production scenarios.
From indoor to outdoor, from home to commercial, the two groundbreaking products fully demonstrate the courage of ECOVACS to guide the direction for robotic industry as a leader. And the core technology innovations behind these two products, Robotic Vision and HIVE, a multi-robot collaboration system, have shown the company's vision for the future. With the significantly expanded product portfolio, ECOVACS made a step further towards its goal to become the world's leading robotics company. It is also a powerful reflection of the company's new mission "Robotics for All".
Opening up the Golden Age for Robotic Lawn Mowers with "Robotic Vision"
GOAT G1, the first intelligent robotic lawn mower of ECOVACS, with the core technology "Robotic Vision", provides a smooth mowing experience for customers, making their lawn care safer, easier, and more efficient.
By 2021, the global market scale of robotic vacuum cleaner reached to 6.1 billion USD, and ECOVACS has been a significant contributor, building its leadership through constant innovations at this segment over the past decades. When the scenario shifted from home cleaning to lawn care, the robotization rate of lawn mowers is only 10%. The poor performance, along with difficult user experience remains as the major pain point for existing robotic lawn mower at the market.
ECOVACS started its innovation on robotic lawn mowers from identifying users' unmet needs. The users need overcome three challenges with existing products: time-consuming efforts to pre-set the boundaries through manual installation of electronic cables, inefficiency of lawn mowing, and risk of getting stuck with other objects, resulting in injuries or damages. There are three core capabilities to tackle those bottlenecks: "Boundary Recognization", "Localization" and "Navigation". These capabilities are exactly where ECOVACS is ahead of others.
ECOVACS believes that "Robotic Vision" is the best solution for robotic lawn mower to unlock full capabilities. GOAT G1 is equipped with ECOVACS' revolutionary localization solution, TrueMapping Multi-Fusion Localization System. This is empowered by a binocular vision solution never seen before in the industry, that is composed of a 360-degree panoramic camera and a fish-eye camera. The solution can achieve centimeter-level accurate positioning in a garden space with unclear physical boundary and undulating ground. The system is also integrated with technologies of ultra- wideband (UWB) wireless carrier wave communication, inertial navigation, and GPS localization, making the localization solution more stable.
The "Robotic Vision" solution of GOAT G1 has released people from the complicated boundary setting efforts, making logical mowing, navigation and obstacle avoidance possible. When using it for the first time, user just need to remotely control GOAT G1 with the app to make a full walk around the garden, and G1 will define the boundaries and create a map for a standard garden through this way in less than 30 minutes. This also dramatically improves the mowing efficiency and outcomes. GOAT G1 can mow a lawn of 600 square meters a day, and deliver a fresh, neat and presentable cut. This product is also equipped with AIVI 3D solution consisting of a vision sensor and a ToF sensor, which ensures GOAT G1 able to identify common obstacles on a lawn without injuring people, animals or damaging properties. Additionally, GOAT G1 can serve as a robotic garden keeper to enhance garden security.
At the launch, ECOVACS also officially announced GOAT G1's ambassador: Mr. Michael Ballack, former captain of the German national football team, and three times winner of German Footballer of the Year. ECOVACS cooperates with Mr. Ballack because the characteristics of his career - "precise, robust and smart" are well-aligned with the capabilities of GOAT G1. Mr. Ballack enjoys a great reputation and influence in Europe, which is one of the key markets of this product.
GOAT G1 will be available for both China and Europe region in March 2023, which will bring "A cut above the rest" and greatly improve users' experience by taking them into the Golden Age of lawn care. This product showcases ECOVACS' competence to expand robotics scenarios from continuously pursuing technology breakthroughs.
Redefining the Future of Commercial Cleaning Robots
ECOVACS not only broke through the technical barriers from indoor to outdoor scenario, but also brought a new robotics solution to the field of commercial cleaning.
By the end of 2021, the size of China's market for commercial cleaning equipment was up to 7 billion USD, while its robotization rate only accounted for 0.56%. Commercial settings such as shopping malls, office buildings, hotels, as well as catering and retail spaces are usually large and complex, having higher demands for robotic performance. However, existing products are either not up to the challenge or unaffordable. Responding to this issue, ECOVACS not only just focuses on product development, it also thinks about how to promote the widespread adoption of robots in the commercial cleaning scenes.
DEEBOT PRO announced by ECOVACS today is an unprecedented integrated solution for commercial cleaning, which includes innovation on three fronts: a multi-product portfolio, an imaginative way of how robots work together, and a cost-saving business model. The solution is aiming to provide a real and intelligent commercial cleaning experience for customers, saving their time, effort and cost, making "Robotics for All" possible.
DEEBOT PRO includes a smaller robot K1, and a bigger robot M1. The combination use of K1 and M1 can meet the floor cleaning requirements of complex commercial spaces of different sizes. To achieve synergy among multiple robots, ECOVACS brings an industry first, multi-robot collaboration system, HIVE: Homogeneous Intelligence Variable Execution. HIVE can be thought of as a powerful brain shared among multiple robots. It enables them to exchange environment and location information automatically, and makes the cooperation among robots possible in commercial scenarios. To reduce customer's operation costs, ECOVACS proposed a leasing model for the first time, and launched its first ECOVACS Robotics leasing platform in China today. DEEBOT PRO will be available in commercial spaces in the first quarter of next year.
DEEBOT PRO reflects ECOVACS' anticipation and pioneering efforts prepared for the future trend of robotic application. The company believes that multi-robot collaboration has a great potential, and that's why it developed the HIVE system. The operation of HIVE on DEEBOT PRO attributes to the high-precision lidar of KRUISEE, which is ECOVACS' owned proprietary technology. Both K1 and M1 are equipped with the same lidars, which ensure the same precision and the same angle of view. A map created by each of them can be instantly synchronized to the HIVE system along with the location information, which will then be distributed to all the collaborating robots. The application of the HIVE system can develop far beyond this, and more robotic product solution can grow out from it.
Stepping into Broader Scenarios of Robotics Use Through Forward-thinking Innovation
Over the past 25 years, ECOVACS has been working on the user-centric innovation. Its efforts define the industry of service robots. Driven by real consumer needs, GOAT G1 and DEEBOT PRO announced today is a restatement of ECOVACS' aspiration – offering tangible solutions to solve users' problems through meaningful product and technology innovations.
From indoor to outdoor, home to commercial, and even a broader ecosystem of robots ECOVACS perceived, this company has been leading the industry with its constant breakthroughs on hardware components such as chips, motors, sensors, and continuous innovations on software capabilities, such as AI, SLAM, algorithms and navigation.
The innovation of ECOVACS does not only focus on products, but also keeps eyes on the robotic ecosystem and the entire industry value chain. The company has incubated the intelligent sensor brand KRUISEE and developed its first-ever HIVE system. And it has been increasing spending on R&D to develop core parts across the value chain in support of robotic production. ECOVACS has also been promoting robotics innovation and public education, etc. Such efforts demonstrate ECOVACS' commitment to shape and empower the robotics industry as a leader.
ECOVACS always innovates with a vision facing future. It believes the potential of human-robot collaborations and the cooperation among multiple robots, so it continues to increase investment in this field. Last year, ECOVACS announced YIKO, an intelligent voice assistant, which pioneered a new model for human-robot interaction in the service robot industry. The HIVE system announced this year allows robots to connect with each other, providing more possibilities for the development of robots.
ECOVACS has been striving to set itself apart from others by disrupting the user experience and driving the widespread adoption of robots through its strong R&D capabilities, whether for lawn care or for commercial cleaning. This has echoed the company's mission - "Robotics for All". Down the road of becoming the world's leading robotics company, ECOVACS will stay committed to growing applications from lifestyle to production, building a valuable platform for service robots, and driving the transformation and evolution of the entire industry.
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About ECOVACS ROBOTICS
Innovation has been in ECOVACS' DNA since the very first day. ECOVACS Robotics is one of the earliest service robot developers and manufacturers in the world. We are laser-focused on independent and groundbreaking R&D, design and manufacturing of service robots. We stay committed to our ambition of becoming the world's leading robotics company. ECOVACS Robotics has a single-minded mission - "Robotics For All."
Over 20 years of design and industry-leading research have led to ECOVACS winning recognition from global customers. We focus on our vision - "Advancing robotic technologies to serve the world, to create a holistic ecosystem between human and robotics in lifestyle and production". We stay committed to avant grade R&D to understand users' needs, innovating to build a better world, and promoting the growth of our industry.