Being the “Domestique” of Chinese High-end Sensor, Hyperson Received A+ Round of Financing

In a bicycle race, cyclists need to break through the air resistance to reach the fastest speed while riding at high speed. The "domestique" in the team plays a role in disrupting the opponent's rhythm to help the team leader win.

This can be used as a metaphor in the domestic and international group competition in the field of high-end sensors. In the above race, Chinese sensor enterprises need to break through the resistance of "strong wind" from foreign brands in order to occupy a place in the 100 billion level sensor market which is highly monopolized by foreign companies.

Hyperson team, having been involved in the sensor field since 2008, plays the role of "domestique" and "breaker" on Chinese side.

On August 20th, Heperson revealed to "Gaogong Robot" that it had completed tens of millions of yuan in A+ round of financing. This round of financing is jointly invested by Huaxin Capital and Weihe Catipal. The funds will be mainly used to strengthen the company's technology research and development, product line upgrades, mass production, and domestic and foreign market expansion.

At present, the domestic sensor field is faced with the following situation: lack of brands, serious polarization, saturation of medium and low-end sensor market, homogeneous competition, lack of brand recognition, etc. Therefore, more than 80% of high-end sensors rely on imports, making large profits goes to foreign companies.

On the other hand, foreign sensors have disadvantages such as high price, long procurement time and delay in work. At the same time, most of the imported sensors will have problems such as drift and inaccurate measurement after being used for about a year and then need to be returned to the local area for re-calibration, for which the user needs to take about three months of time cost.

In order to solve the above-mentioned pain points, it is urgent to develop sensors with our own technology and brand.

In recent years, as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies are gradually applied in China, autonomous sensing technology has become an inevitable trend. Data shows that the market size of global robot sensors reached 350 million US dollars in 2015 and will double to 709 million US dollars by 2021 with a compound annual growth rate of 12.4% in this period. Therefore, there is huge potential for import substitution.

In 2020, industrial manufacturing industry and 3C electronic manufacturing industry, in which many sensors are applied, are affected by industrial adjustment and epidemic situation. Under the cost pressure, more and more customers prefer to use domestic brand sensor.

Recently, European and American countries, represented by the United States, have begun to impose export controls on China's high-end sensor products and technologies. Uncertainty in the international situation has also caused domestic companies to pay more attention to their economic "internal circulation", which has brought more opportunities for Heberson.

Founded in 2015, hyperson has been focusing on the R & D, production and sales of industrial grade high-precision and high-reliability sensors, and has provided a series of high-end optical mechanical sensor products and one-stop solutions to hundreds of customers in the fields of high-precision non-contact detection, industrial robots and industrial automation.

Wang Guoan, general manager of Hyperson, believes that domestic sensors are expected to develop rapidly from the 3C industry, especially in the polishing scene with robot force control. In addition, sensors also play a very important role in industrial detection.

Up to now, Hyperson has obtained dozens of national patents, and all the company's products have passed third-party international certifications such as CE, FCC, and RoHS, and have been widely used in various industrial automation equipment, robots, 3C electronics, and precision testing.

In addition to the domestic market, Hyperson is also actively expanding overseas markets such as Europe, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc., hoping to establish a good reputation for China's intelligent manufacturing in overseas markets through excellent product quality and professional technical services.

In the future, Hyperson will continue to increase R&D and investment in new technologies and products, providing more high-performance and high-reliability sensor products for domestic customers, realizing the complete import substitution of high-end sensor products in the near future to reduce the cost and improve efficiency for domestic customers.

God is in the detail

Heperson's product solutions are recognized by customers, which is inseparable from Wang Guoan's personal experience and corporate values.

Wang Guoan told "Gaogong Robot" that what impressed him most during the six years of studying in Japan was the Japanese ultimate pursuit of technology and details. After returning home, he found that many domestic enterprises were more concerned about which industry can get the most with the least investment when running business.

However, a sensor system includes many pars, such as optics, circuit, material, structure, data acquisition, amplification, processing, and algorithm. Though it's not very difficult to make this thing, it’s challenging if you want to do it well because it's a multiplication process.

"If we only achieve 80 points for each point and multiply them, we will get a very ordinary product. But if we pursue the best performance in each point and achieve 95 points, the final result will be completely different." Wang Guoan said.

Adhering to this obsession to make products, Hypersen now has a completely independent intelligent manufacturing center, thousands of square meters of intelligent manufacturing base, 1000-level optical assembly dust-free room, high-precision SMT automated production line that is equal to German and Japanese quality control standards.

Heperson's products involve high-precision optical detection and mechanical feedback control and other application scenarios. Its Confocal Chromatic Sensor has excellent adaptability in surface measurement with repeated measurement accuracy as high as ± 0.3 μ m, which can carry out the measurement under a mirror surface of ±62°and diffuse reflective surface super-large angle of ±88°. Besides, its 6D Force Torque Sensor, Single Point TOF Ranging sensor, Solid-state LiDAR and other products have been widely used in a dozen of application scenarios.

Among them, the 6D Force Torque Sensor can be applied to industrial robots to realize functions such as precision assembly, precision grinding, robot’s dragging and teaching, and also suitable for collaborative robots, exoskeleton robots, medical robots, flexible claws, automated measurement, control, and wind tunnels. Tests, etc., It can also be applied in scenarios include robot’s dragging and teaching, path planning, force-controlled grinding, polishing and palletizing, precision assembly, loading and unloading, torque feedback control, etc. Currently, it supports robot systems from nearly 20 domestic and foreign brands such as KUKA, ABB, Yaskawa, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Epson, Toshiba, Universal Robots, Luoshi, Jieka, and AUBO.

Communicating with Wang Guoan, I can deeply feel that he still keeps original aspiration and passion from the beginning of his business. As he said: “What I have always insisted and advocated is taking every detail of our customers, products and technology seriously with the spirit of craftsmanship. That is, we should try to make everything perfect and shall not be opportunistic, building confidence and trust for customers and partners through our own efforts. The future development of the high-end sensor field of the motherland may not be attributed to me, but there must be my persistence and hard work."

Facing the current situation of domestic brand’s low recognition from domestic market, Wang Guoan also appeals to excellent and pioneering robot companies, system integrators and other customers to provide domestic high-end smart sensors more opportunities and support. Hyperson expects to work together with enterprises in the entire industrial chain of robots to contribute to China's intelligent manufacturing.