From concept to performance, the "spring" of humanoid robots has arrived?

Author: Read Finance

Investing in the track is one of the best investment strategies. If you find the track before dawn, you can get huge excess returns. A typical example is the new energy industry in the past few years. Now that the new energy trend has passed, the opportunity for humanoid robots has arrived.

Since the beginning of this year, humanoid robot concept stocks Dahua shares have risen by more than 104%, and Far East Transmission has risen by more than 82%. The entire robot index also rose by more than 40%. You know, the AI sector that exploded in the first half of the year only rose by 20% in the same period.

The core of the surge in humanoid robots is that the degree of industrialization exceeds expectations. A few days ago, Tesla’s video showed the latest progress of the humanoid robot Optimus. Due to its excellent performance, it greatly increased the possibility of industrial implementation and directly contributed to A-share robot concept stocks such as Keyuan Wisdom and Dahua Technology. With a daily limit. Domestically, on September 26, Fourier’s intelligent universal humanoid robot GR-1 has also started pre-sale.

It is foreseeable that the mass production of humanoid robots is imminent, which has brought performance support to humanoid robot concept stocks.

This article holds the following views:

1. **Humanoid robots have transformed from concepts to performance. ** Tesla and other leading companies in the industry have already set a clear mass production date, and humanoid robot parts suppliers have also given positive guidance on the pace of mass production of parts. Judging from the mass production pace of the entire industry chain, companies related to the industry chain are about to reap revenue from humanoid robots.

2. **AI breaks the bottleneck of humanoid robot industrialization. **Humanoid machines need to integrate motion modules, sensing modules and artificial intelligence modules. Previously, due to technical bottlenecks, it was difficult to efficiently integrate the above three modules. However, the large AI model has changed this status quo, effectively combining the perception, decision-making, and operation control of humanoid robots, and greatly improved product performance and implementation progress.

3. Investment opportunities in humanoid robots can focus on core components. **Humanoid robot manufacturers, as the most valuable enterprises in the industry chain, have great investment value. In addition, core components such as core control systems, motors, and reducers also have high added value and barriers, and are also worthy of attention.

The industrialization of humanoid robots exceeds expectations

Under the trend of population aging, robots that replace human labor to reduce costs and increase efficiency must be a definite investment opportunity. This can be seen from the performance of humanoid robot concept stocks, which have risen by more than 75% since the beginning of this year.

Humanoid robot concept stocks are very popular. Starting from the entire robot industry chain, robots are mainly divided into three categories: industrial robots, service robots, and humanoid robots. Among them, industrial robots mainly perform high-precision repetitive work through clear programs. For example, the representative company of automobile assembly is KUKA of Germany. Service robots imitate human abilities and perform lower-progress work, such as sweeping robots, which represent enterprises. It’s Cobos.

Compared with the first two categories, humanoid robots are the category with the most investment potential in the current robot industry. Although as early as 1973, Waseda University in Japan developed the world’s first life-size humanoid intelligent robot-WABOT-1. However, in the past half century or so, humanoid robots have never been able to be industrialized. The reason is not difficult to understand. Humanoid robots are the most technically difficult category in the robotics industry. They are closer to humanoids and have a high degree of simulation. They not only need to perform high-precision work, but also have greater versatility and can be applied in various scenarios.

However, humanoid robots have reached an inflection point this year, and their industrialization process has exceeded expectations. A typical example is that Tesla showed the latest progress of the humanoid robot Optimus in a video on social media two days ago. Through video demonstrations, the industry believes that Optimus has been upgraded in visual perception and motion control capabilities.

Among them, in terms of visual perception, Optimus can accurately realize limb position calibration and motion control, realize the classification and grasping of color-difference objects, and has the ability to eliminate interference and automatically correct errors (it is not affected by the intervention of external personnel and can automatically right inverted objects). In terms of motion control capabilities, Optimus has strong control over strength during the process of grabbing and placing objects, and the entire movement shows delicacy and flexibility close to that of a human hand. In addition, Optimus can realize yoga stretching movements and maintain balance, which requires extremely high center of gravity distribution, movement positioning, and adjustment capabilities.

After upgrading its visual perception and movement control capabilities, Optimus can be used in various fields such as industry, medical treatment, and daily life. Affected by the unexpected progress of Optimus industrialization, after the release of the Optimus video, robot concept stocks such as Keyuan Wisdom, Dahua Technology, Far East Transmission, and Shengtong Technology all rose by the daily limit on the A-share market the next day.

So how did the humanoid robot sector exceed expectations?

From concept to performance

In recent years, sectors such as the Metaverse, AI, and humanoid robots have all experienced huge gains in the short term. But unlike most hot concepts, the humanoid robot sector has maintained an upward growth trend for a long time.

Compared with AI, which was very popular in the first half of the year, AI was driven by AIGC and the entire sector rose by more than 50% in just one month. However, it then began to pull back and rose by more than 15% during the year. There has been basically no correction in the robotics sector, and it has continued to trend upward so far, rising by more than 40% during the year.

The trend of humanoid robots is stronger than that of other concepts because humanoid robots are almost certain to be mass-produced and companies in the industry chain will make substantial profits and will no longer be just a mirror image. In other words, humanoid robot concept stocks have completed the transformation from talking about concepts to delivering performance.

Specifically, the mass production of humanoid robots has been put on the schedule. As the leader, Tesla Robot is currently in the B-prototype stage and is expected to start small batch production by the end of 2024. In China, Fourier Intelligent Company announced on September 26 that its intelligent general humanoid robot GR-1 has started pre-sales.

The mass production of humanoid robots is also about to boost the performance of upstream suppliers. Core companies in the supply chain have given positive guidance on the pace of mass production of humanoid robots. For example, Tuopu Group said: “The robot linear actuators and rotary actuators developed by the company have been sent to customers many times and have been recognized and praised by customers. The project requirements will enter the mass production ramp-up stage starting from the first quarter of 2024. The initial order is 100 units per week. In order to meet customer requirements, the company needs to complete the installation and commissioning of 4 sets of production lines this year to form a first-phase production capacity of 100,000 units per year, and subsequently increase the annual production capacity to one million units.”

From concept to implementation, it benefits from breakthroughs in the core pain points of humanoid robots. Specifically, the robot consists of three key technology modules: motion module, sensing module and artificial intelligence module. For ordinary traditional robots, only one of these technologies is often needed to have practical value. For example, industrial robots mainly focus on motion control technology, while sweeping robots focus on navigation sensing technology.

This is not the case for humanoid robots. It must be versatile in application scenarios, rather than a single task in a specific scenario. As a result, humanoid robots require higher technology integration and fusion, the need to model larger data sets, and a stronger understanding of language and instructions. But before, AI data and models were basically developed in isolation, and the iteration speed was very slow. It was difficult for humanoid robots to achieve an efficient combination of perception, decision-making, and operation control.

But the emergence of large models has changed this situation. Large models are developing from single-modal large models such as text, speech, and vision to general AI that integrates multiple modalities. This allows voice, vision, decision-making, control and other technologies to be directly combined with humanoid robots to comprehensively improve robot performance. As a result, the humanoid robot’s perception, decision-making, and operation control have also been effectively combined.

So, with the gradual implementation of humanoid robots, which links in the industry chain deserve special attention?

**What does the humanoid robot shoot? **

Referring to the rapid development of electric vehicles that began in 2019, automobile manufacturers, as the highest value link in the industrial chain, frequently make bullish stocks. However, in addition to OEMs, core automotive parts and components with higher barriers and better layout, such as batteries, separators, electrolytes, etc., have all outperformed the big bull stocks.

Returning to investment in humanoid robots, humanoid robots have high barriers to entry, require strong integrated software and hardware capabilities, and have a large industry space. The market size is in the trillions, so humanoid robot manufacturers are naturally betting heavily.

At present, among humanoid robot manufacturers, Tesla has a clear advantage. It has both mechanical hardware capabilities and obvious advantages in visual perception, algorithms, virtual simulation and other software. And the Tesla car factory also provides application scenarios for humanoid robots.

Compared with Tesla’s “big name”, the core parts and components fields with high added value and high barriers in the humanoid robot industry chain may provide more information gap opportunities.

According to calculations by Soochow Securities, the value proportion of humanoid robot parts is as follows: core control system accounts for 39%, motors account for 19%, reducers account for 14%, planetary roller screws account for 9%, and sensors account for 9%. About 3%.

From the perspective of the parts value chain, the core control system seems to be the most worthy of investment, but its competitive landscape is not friendly to parts companies. The core control system is equivalent to the “brain” of humanoid robots and is one of the links with the highest technical barriers. Currently, Tesla humanoid robots mainly use self-developed control systems. The control system consists of self-developed FSD system + D1 supercomputing chip. In terms of performance comparison, Tesla’s self-developed Dojo D1 supercomputing chip has improved performance by 4 times at the same cost, 1.3 times at the same energy consumption, and occupies 5 times less space than other products in the industry.

In contrast, although the added value of components such as motors and reducers is not as high as that of the core control system, the investment opportunities may be more certain. Taking motors as an example, motors account for 19% of the cost of humanoid robots after control systems, and major robot manufacturers focus on procurement. More importantly, motors can also open a certain performance gap in humanoid robots. Take servo motors as an example. They are called the “heart of industrial robots” and are generally installed at the “joints” of the robot to provide industrial robots with With precise control effects, leading manufacturers can rely on precise control effects to form competitive advantages and achieve certain performance growth.

Generally speaking, humanoid robots, as the flower of tomorrow that is about to bloom, require long-term tracking and attention to find those key companies and wait for the arrival of huge opportunities.