A Chinese Version of the Robot Dog Emerged

Figure | Yushu Technology AlienGo backflip

Yushu Technology, a robot company founded by a post-90s, is working hard to make the originally expensive four-legged robot into ordinary people's homes and become your pet robot. In less than 4 years since its establishment, Yushu Technology in Hangzhou has become one of the most well-known companies in the field of quadruped robots. In the emerging, niche, and not easy-to-market category of quadruped robots, Yushu Technology began to take orders in 2018 with the first main robot product "Laikago" (Laikago), becoming the earliest commercialization One of the four-legged robot companies.

In the absence of market experience, Wang Shuxing, the founder of Yushu Technology, accurately pinpointed the electric driving route of the quadruped robot. This is also the basis for Yushu Technology to grow smoothly and quickly start magnetization. Today, Yushu Technology has launched different levels of robot products, and has become a large-scale four-foot robot company. At the end of 2019, Yushu Technology announced that it has completed tens of millions of yuan of Pre-A round financing, which was led by Sequoia Capital China Seed Fund.

Electric rather than hydraulic-the key to marketization

In 2015, Wang Xingxing said after winning an award in a robot competition in Shanghai, "The future quadruped robot will definitely be a smaller, electrically driven version to be industrialized, rather than a Boston-powered hydraulic robot." He already had the idea of ​​marketizing robots, and decided that it was electric. This is an advanced idea. It should be understood that at that time, there were no cases of marketization of quadruped robots in the world. Including Boston Dynamics.

Electric or hydraulic, which has a direct relationship with the load and movement ability of the robot. For example, the early Boston-powered four-legged robot big dog used hydraulic drive, which has the advantage that the robot is very powerful. In the case of equivalent size, the load-bearing capacity of the hydraulically driven robot dog has obvious advantages over the all-motor-driven robot dog. However, for hydraulically driven robots, each hydraulic pump needs to be equipped with a high-power engine or motor, which means that when raising the pressure of the hydraulic pump, it will cause noise problems. In addition, problems such as oil leakage, high cost and inconvenient maintenance are also shortcomings of hydraulic drive.

(Source: Yushu Technology)

Yushu Technology's current customers are mainly from universities or research institutes, technology companies and individual buyers. Due to the higher price of the early large-size version (about 3-4 million US dollars), there are fewer individual buyers and mainly from abroad, and now the lighter and cheaper version of Unitree A1 has been launched, and the lowest price has been reduced to 10,000 US dollars Below, orders from individual buyers have also grown significantly. The target of Yushu's robot shipments in 2020 is about 10 times that of 2019. "Because the company's robot market is still in its early stages, this goal is relatively easy to achieve." In the case of a substantial increase in sales targets, the team size should also be doubled, which is to smoothly increase the output of robot products. At the same time, shorten the delivery cycle as much as possible, and even achieve inventory. However, he added that the current situation of the epidemic is still unclear, especially orders from overseas may be affected.