媒體報導，最近，杭州一家科技公司在購物平臺上架了一款售價為2500元的消費級外骨骼機器人，面向個人用戶銷售。上新短短15秒，幾百台就宣告售罄。這款“爆品”是企業首次針對個人使用者推出千元售價的消費級產品，此前他們研發的外骨骼機器人全國已有60多萬人使用，部分產品售價百萬。

In the early days, exoskeletons were mainly used for military and medical rehabilitation (such as helping paraplegic patients walk), and now they have penetrated into industry, logistics, elderly care, consumer fitness and other fields. For example, the "mechanical exoskeleton armor" on the production line can reduce the burden on the waist of workers; The exoskeleton in logistics can reduce the muscle strain of sorters; There are also exoskeletons for the elderly to assist walking. Buyers of this type of product include young and middle-aged people who buy for the elderly in their families, young people who have knee or hip pain due to sports injuries, and many retired middle-aged and elderly people who feel that their physical fitness is declining but love to travel.

The reason why the exoskeleton can leverage a new growth pole on a large scale means that it can match the real demand, which is a relatively successful case from the laboratory to commercialization. To borrow the words of experts, the exoskeleton craze is essentially a manifestation of the technological maturity curve entering the "peak period of real production".

The old man is inconvenient to move, and when he asks what is inconvenient, it is actually the legs, and then specifically the knee joints. People don't dare to climb the mountain when they get to the tourist attraction, not because they don't have the strength, but because they can't do it at the waist. However, the positioning of the exoskeleton is very accurate, and it really corresponds to the physiological pain points and limits of the human body, so it can directly become a "substitute leg" for many people. Now you have to wear sneakers and trekking poles when you go out, and now you have to bring an exoskeleton, and maybe in the near future, it will be an outdoor standard.

Today, car manufacturers such as Honda, robotics companies such as Boston Dynamics, and internet giants such as Google have entered the game, bringing cross-domain technology integration. Compared with the disruptive innovation of humanoid robots, the association and consumption space brought by exoskeletons to consumers is not small at all. Not every tech company has to make a perfect humanoid robot, but it is not impossible to improve and join the development army of exoskeletons. The joint control algorithm of the Termus humanoid robot can be migrated to the exoskeleton. Through the open source ecology and the standardization of exoskeleton interfaces, the development threshold will be lowered, so that the speed of entering thousands of households will be much faster than that of a robot.

Of course, exoskeleton consumption is still just the beginning, or belongs to the first choice of new humans and medical institutions, to make the family fully acceptable, in addition to the price, its product life is also very important. Recall that many years ago, many wealthy families would buy a massage chair worth tens of thousands of yuan for their families. Can you still see these massage chairs today? Most of them were eliminated before the AI wave because of the lack of intelligence and networking capabilities, coupled with the problem of mechanical life.

As a milestone in the "augmentation technology" that human beings have broken through the limits of physiology. In order for exoskeleton consumption to remain evergreen, it is natural that it will evolve from a professional tool to a mass consumer product, just like smartphones. With intelligence and networking, it is easy to use like an organ of a person, becoming an important breakthrough in human-machine collaboration and an invisible companion supporting the body. On the contrary, if you only stay in an external offline existence such as a massage chair, then the vitality is also limited.

Text| Reporter Qi Yaoqi

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