The shocking Tesla robot

Recently, Tesla humanoid robot appeared at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, showing a new joint design structure.

Some analysts pointed out that Tesla is expected to use Chinese parts and components to create more cost-effective robots and replicate the advanced ecosystem of Apple's industrial chain.

▍Copy and Refactor

Apple has spent more than two decades and billions of dollars building an unprecedentedly complex supply chain model in China, helping iPhone reach 1.2 billion users worldwide and shipments of 226 million units in 2022.

Today, Tesla’s humanoid robot is a new product across the ages. With the help of huge market order expectations, it is also trying to reshape a new manufacturing system for humanoid robots in China and build a supply chain based on “Tesla standards” of miracles.

Comparing the practices of the two companies, we will be surprised to find that an excellent product is often difficult to obtain by adding, subtracting, or modifying parts already on the market. Forward design and industrial chain collaboration are the basic elements for the further improvement of corporate products and comprehensive strength.

In 1998, Cook took charge of Apple's computer production business. His approach was unique and difficult to understand, and had an important impact on the early development of Apple's supply chain.

At that time, Apple did not use off-the-shelf parts, but chose to customize a large number of products, which would significantly increase the cost.

But Apple insists on personally designing the manufacturing process of these parts and assembling these customized parts into extremely complex systems with unprecedented scale and flexibility.

This is obviously not easy. To this end, in the past fifteen years, Apple has used marketing to obtain larger orders to attract and reward suppliers. On the other hand, it has also gradually established an extremely complex, in-depth and high-cost supply and production system in China.

In order to ensure that this process is stable and controllable, Apple has been sending its top product designers and manufacturing design engineers to China to improve and polish the product manufacturing process.

After arriving in China, these Apple engineers will spend several months collaboratively designing a new production process and supervising the details of the production process until the production runs smoothly and operates normally. At the same time, they must also pay close attention to the supply. Whether the manufacturer's production complies with regulations.

Equipment is also part of Apple's investment. In addition to investing a lot of human resources, Apple has also spent billions of dollars to purchase customized equipment with suppliers and develop some exclusive expertise. For example, the aluminum alloy body integrated molding technology and the application technology of special welding wire materials shocked the world at the time.

Statistics show that with the increase in iPhone production in the early years, the value of Apple's "long-term assets (mainly used for manufacturing equipment)" in China soared from US$370 million in 2009 to US$7.3 billion in 2012.

At that time, this figure already exceeded the combined value of all Apple’s building assets and retail stores, a large part of which was the advanced CNC machine tools purchased by Apple.

Therefore, Apple’s standards and supply chain system have become the products of Apple’s entry into the global market and establishment of technological competitiveness, and have also profoundly affected Apple and China for many years to come.

In other words, Cook moved the production of Apple products from the United States to China, built an extremely efficient supply chain system in China, truly completed Jobs's design, and laid the foundation for Apple's rise.

Tesla is currently working hard to design a new humanoid robot that is unique on the market. Musk came to China to explore new industry chain restructuring opportunities among Chinese suppliers.

From conception to modeling to processing into a working robot, the Tesla robotics team not only integrates advanced car-making concepts into robot manufacturing, reshapes mechanical art with intelligent and efficient R&D speed, but also attempts to In the selection and procurement of parts, we began to establish our own standards.

The selection of parts and suppliers is not as easy as imagined. Apple initially used a "first principles" drill-down approach to find suppliers.

At that time, Apple would inquire and negotiate with suppliers for several hours, and then let engineers and suppliers commit to determine the number of customized parts required for mass production of Apple, but the condition is that must be effective Master the supplier's technology research and development roadmap, and at the same time gain a comprehensive understanding of any problems that may arise in various aspects such as cost, design and mass production.

But if cooperation is confirmed, Apple will help suppliers jointly improve and upgrade production lines. This is equivalent to putting the equipment it bought in other people's factories. This move also made Apple favored by more suppliers.

By insisting on following this strict supply chain screening and training process, Apple has grown with its suppliers for about ten years before establishing its current mature industrial chain system.

▍The power of systemization

Prior to this, close cooperation with Apple had brought huge benefits to suppliers, which also made suppliers willing to follow Apple's instructions and suggestions.

For example, Foxconn’s revenue in 2000 was approximately US$3 billion. In 2010, Foxconn’s revenue reached US$98 billion, exceeding the combined revenue of its five largest competitors. By 2022, Foxconn's revenue will reach US$214.2 billion.

With the strengthened bargaining power and voice driven by orders, the control of the details of parts allows Apple's supply chain to maintain efficient operation.

While other manufacturers are still busy negotiating specifications with suppliers, Apple engineers are already very good at asking more detailed inquiries about suppliers' standard specifications. They believe that when they ask enough questions, they will quickly discover the crux of the problem and solve the problem quickly.

This also allows Apple engineers to quickly move from the whole to the details, and then improve the whole from the details, ultimately pushing suppliers to passively accept improvements in small details.

In addition to equipment, Apple also controls resource circulation to the extreme.

Since 2008, at least 23.6 million workers have moved in Apple’s supply chain, a very high turnover rate. Suppliers focus on Apple's needs and form labor resources with a certain skill set and a certain form of production supporting combinations in surrounding cities and regions, and then refine them.

Finally, this industry chain has both subcontractors for various types of work and companies in various specialized fields.

This modular labor ratio can achieve a more flexible combination of productivity resources. It also allows Apple to quickly find corresponding resources after expanding production or improving processes, completing a highly developed manufacturing ecosystem. Build. Some analysts believe that Apple now only needs 14,000 people to supervise and control the weekly work of 1.5 million workers in the global supply chain. This is a systematic force.

The increase in inventory turnover rate reflects the huge systematic advantage. Apple's electronic products always stand out. Apple's inventory turnover rate is 2.5 times that of Nokia, and 12 times that of Coca-Cola, from a data perspective.

There are therefore concerns that the complex costs and production processes of humanoid robots may make it difficult to achieve high inventory turnover rates. How to solve this problem may require Tesla's longer-term investment in system construction before it is expected to move towards the 10 billion robots mentioned by Musk.

▍Tesla’s forward design

The good news is that Tesla is now screening and helping its own suppliers, and has begun preliminary comparison and testing of supplied supplier samples.

The difference is that Thanks to advanced technologies such as virtual simulation and 3D printing, Tesla has adopted a barbell-style vertical development process from R&D to production. That is to say, we pay attention to prototype design and virtual simulation testing at both ends. This allows Tesla to devote more energy to product improvement and parameter optimization in the early stages of design, rather than the intermediate manufacturing process.

For example, when studying the actuator of the Tesla robot Optimus, Tesla is trying a drive system with a

motor and gear set, and further parameterizes and virtualizes the gear set for modeling testing

, thereby completing the redesign and reconstruction of every detailed component. According to the judgment of some agencies, the Tesla humanoid robot Optimus unveiled this time is equipped with 12 motors each for the arms, palms, and legs, and 2 motors each for the neck and torso, a total of 40 motors, all of which use similar brand-new components and The structural design method forms two main forms: rotary actuator and linear actuator.

It needs to contain at least 3 series of motors, planetary roller screw actuators, and 3 series of motors, harmonic rotary actuators. Of course, we don’t rule out more new parts that we don’t know about yet.

As the marginal changes in Tesla's

industrial chain become more and more obvious

, Tesla's new component production and combination methods have led to new developments such as planetary roller screws, coreless motors, The market for brand new components such as needle roller bearing products. Because parts such as the fingers of humanoid robots have a small space, the finger joints of humanoid robots will inevitably need to be equipped with more miniaturized motors that can output greater force in the future. At present, similar new coreless motors can indeed more perfectly meet the needs of humanoid robots for lightweight and high-precision finger joints.

Although the advantage of this part of the product is that it can self-lock & provide greater thrust, the difficulty lies in its small size and difficulty in processing the nut. The overall demand in the original market is low, so most of them require customized development and production. .

Under Tesla’s high expectations for the market, parts companies are currently scrambling to try to reach cooperation with Tesla. The agency pointed out that assuming that Tesla robots reach one million units, the cost of a single robot is expected to reach 190,000 yuan, of which the coreless cup motor module of a single robot is worth about 7,200 yuan, which may also make suppliers Willing to try to make customized molds for Tesla . Thanks to the news that Tesla is looking for Chinese suppliers to compare, the stock prices of companies such as MOONS Electric and Jiangsu Leili have risen sharply in the secondary market. It was revealed that relevant samples had been sent to Tesla in the United States and the test results were good and received high recognition. Southern Seiko once became a star target.

The market's hype logic is also very simple. On the one hand, the application field of coreless cups is relatively high-end, with high design and manufacturing barriers. We are optimistic about the application of humanoid robots in driving the market size of coreless cup motors. On the other hand,

Tesla Suppliers are also expected to replicate the growth trajectory of Apple’s original supplier cooperation, which is worth investing in.

After receiving initial support from suppliers, Tesla used modular independent design to quickly form several sets of overall development plans with the help of parts, and then asked suppliers to process them according to this set of plans and indicators.

Then Tesla engineers will put this plan into the virtual simulation software

, and conduct detailed drills and parameter adjustments based on the simulation software that simulates the real environment,

to get the final result Dynamic parameters suitable for robot motion, and based on the actual situation, determine the problems of parts in certain actions, optimize the structure and packaging of modular actuators, and complete a forward design cycle . Thanks to the complete system design from scratch, engineers can optimize the product in depth and detail according to the design requirements, and ultimately deliver and iterate the design results quickly.

This vertical design process from 0-1 allows Tesla engineers to go deep into the design of electromagnetics and gear sets, and complete a very simple and compact packaging design, allowing the final robot's size and movement capabilities to reach a The ideal state also

significantly reduces the workload of the final system integration

.

▍Conclusion and the future

Tesla’s humanoid robot production is currently in the early stages of supply chain cooperation, and the supplier list has not yet been announced. But if Tesla's original design plan is followed, a humanoid robot may eventually need more than 200 degrees of freedom, of which the hands alone have 27 degrees of freedom. At the same time, the power consumption of fast walking is only 500W, which will inevitably require a very huge supply chain support.

When the leading suppliers appear, it will not be easy for latecomers to imitate and surpass the technical moat brought by this supply chain. For example, when the demand for mobile phones in China exploded, in order to keep up with Apple, global mobile phone manufacturers came to China one after another and began to seek help from suppliers, and ultimately

provided intellectual property rights in exchange for faster responses

, thus narrowing the gap with Apple. Apple’s series of supply chain system construction actions have helped Chinese suppliers obtain more orders. This order of magnitude advantage has reshaped the global mobile phone industry, has also enabled suppliers to improve their knowledge of cutting-edge manufacturing. understand. Of course, Apple has also successfully occupied the throne of the global electronic technology field through this supply chain cooperation.

For Apple, it is already very difficult to give up this supply chain system. Because even if it builds factories outside of China, the factory's subcontractors and suppliers are still from mainland China. Apple and China are largely tied to in-depth industrial cooperation. Nowadays, robots, as a brand-new product form, have become the focus of technological and industrial development. Our country's installed capacity of industrial robots has exceeded 50% of the global total, ranking first in the world for nine consecutive years. At the same time, it once again has a complete industrial chain that attracts global attention.

At present, domestic hardware suppliers already have strong low-cost large-scale mass production capabilities, and are most likely to be the first to introduce Tesla robot supply chain and seize industry opportunities.

It may not be surprising at all if Musk ultimately chooses Chinese suppliers for his robot components.

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