At present, intelligent manufacturing has become the general trend in the global industrial manufacturing field, and the flexible supply chain has gradually replaced the traditional low-toughness system, putting forward higher requirements for the intelligent manufacturing ability of manufacturing enterprises. At the same time, with the vigorous promotion of China’s new industrialization, the construction of a sound modern high-end manufacturing system has become the meaning of the problem, and ensuring the safety and controllability of the industrial chain and supply chain has also become an important part of intelligent manufacturing. In the field of intelligent manufacturing, robots are an indispensable role.

In recent years, the robot industry has developed with strong momentum and huge potential, and has become a strategic highland for countries to compete for. With the continuous progress of hardware and software technology, robots continue to have higher accuracy, stronger adaptability and a broader range of applications, extending from industrial manufacturing to medical, service and other fields, and gradually becoming an important force to promote the high-quality development of economic and social. At the same time, in terms of technological innovation in the core components of robots, Chinese enterprises have made remarkable progress in both research and development and manufacturing. For example, the localization level of key components such as servo motors, reducers, and controllers is getting higher and higher. Among them, taking the “joint” of the robot – the reducer as an example, we can see that domestic enterprises, including the United States industrial technology, took the initiative to provoke the girder and opened the “accelerated movement” of the domestic reducer.

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Midea industrial technology high performance harmonic reducer

Break through the bottleneck of reducer development with core technology

China’s robot market accounted for 52% of the global market, becoming the world’s largest market for ten consecutive years. According to the China Robot Industry Development Report (2022), the global robot market is expected to exceed 65 billion US dollars in 2024, and the market space is very broad. Among them, the growth of Chinese brands of industrial robots is the fastest year-on-year in the last decade, and almost more than half of the national economy is applying its own brand robots.

In the future, with technological progress and scenario expansion, the robot industry will continue to grow. Industrial robots are mainly used in the production lines of automotive, electronics, food, medicine and other industries, which help enterprises reduce costs and enhance competitiveness by improving production efficiency and accuracy. Taking industrial robots as an example, the cost of precision reducer is about 30%, and this ratio is higher in humanoid robots.

It can be seen that the reducer is closely related to the development of high-end manufacturing industry, in order to better promote the upgrading of China’s modern industry, the state and relevant authorities have formulated a series of support and guidance policies, and then promote the development of the reducer towards high precision, high performance, further improve energy efficiency, achieve localization and other directions, trying to solve the bottleneck restricting the development of robots. In June 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other five departments issued the “Manufacturing Reliability Improvement Implementation Opinions”, requiring the focus on improving the reliability level of key special basic parts such as precision reducer for industrial robots, which means that the future high-end equipment manufacturing will benchmark the advanced level of similar international products and take the lead in becoming the “long board” of manufacturing. With the mass production of some of the domestic RV reducer and harmonic reducer, the domestic precision reducer industry has entered the domestic replacement stage.

It is under the trend of this high-end technology transformation, Midea industrial technology is keenly aware of market demand, relying on its own strong strength and years of practice in the field of precision manufacturing, since 2019, it has focused on the research and development and manufacturing of precision reducer, and has accumulated rich experience in key areas such as gears, bearings, materials, simulation, friction and wear, and lubrication.

For example, although the harmonic reducer on the market has initially achieved localization and a wide variety, there is still a certain gap between the product quality of most domestic brands and well-known foreign brands, and its accuracy and life still lag behind the products of leading foreign enterprises. Harmonic reducer is the core component of industrial robot, its precision, durability and other performance levels directly determine the performance of the robot machine. In addition to the huge cost input and other factors, due to the lack of forward design technology and basic technology research, there is a lack of effective solutions to the problems such as jitter, noise, leakage and failure in the application side. It can not meet the high-quality supporting standards of robot manufacturers, and it is more difficult to deal with the cost and time problems faced by flexible intelligent processing and production enterprises in small batches and multiple varieties and rapid conversion of production lines.

In response to this series of “difficult diseases”, the United States industrial technology from the establishment of an industry-leading R & D team, focusing on reducer accuracy and service life to increase research and development efforts. Today, its forward design technology with independent intellectual property rights and the industry’s first M-shaped tooth design, to promote the bearing capacity and life of reducer products greatly improved, the overall performance has been identified by the “international advanced” level, so that the current domestic reducer “jam neck” technical problems have been effectively cracked, more industrial production applications to promote the high-quality development of China’s robot industry.

Help China’s robot industry deeper and further development

For manufacturing enterprise customers, whether they have customized production or large-scale finished product processing needs, these significant technical features can be added to the building blocks. The processing of some precision parts has strict requirements for product accuracy, and the processing accuracy that can be achieved by robots is of course the first standard for customers to consider. Similarly, for the needs of repeated mass production, the processing life under 24-hour uninterrupted working conditions is related to the direct benefits of the enterprise. The durability and other performance levels of the high-performance harmonic reducer directly determine the use value and processing uses of the robot, as well as whether it can operate flexibly and permanently in different automated production lines.

Relying on the advantages in lean manufacturing, research and development and patents, Midea industrial technology has harvested 80 technical patents in the field of reducer, becoming a new force in the domestic reducer industry. Stability, reliability and high precision is an important scale to measure the performance of the reducer, Midea industrial technology high performance harmonic reducer in the material source with both high precision and high rigidity industry high standard materials, in the air, lag loss, transmission error, torsional rigidity and other indicators are comparable to the industry benchmark; Optimize the structure design, adopt flexible wheel variable wall thickness design and other high-precision simulation technology to reduce the force of flexible bearing, thus greatly improving the life of the reducer; Original M tooth shape design, improve the simultaneous mesh rate of tooth shape, greatly improve the bearing capacity and life of the product