Heavy | Midea IoT releases four major IoT platforms, launches new home appliance smart grading standards

On October 14th, the 2021 Midea Intelligent Conference hosted by Midea Group IoT was grandly held in Foshan. The theme of this conference is "Technology Leadership·Industry Breakthrough", Midea Group Vice President and CIO Zhang Xiaoyi, IoT vice president and CTO Xiang Jiang and other executives, guests from all walks of life, ecological partners, core users, technology innovators, etc. attended the conference.

Focusing on core topics such as smart home appliance classification, IoT cutting-edge technology trends, digital intelligence technology capability construction and product applications, smart home opening and cooperation, global smart home market trends, and other core issues, Midea IoT executives and consumers from Huawei Dr. Wang Chenglu, President of Business AI and Smart Full Scenario Business Department, China Electric Power Research Institute Senior Engineer Yao Guofeng, Open Atom Open Source Foundation COO Hou Yan, Professor Qiu Xipeng, School of Computer Science and Technology, Fudan University, General Manager of GfK China Home Appliances Division Guests and representatives such as Zhang Cun carried out in-depth discussion on the topic.

At the press conference, Midea IoT released a series of technological innovations including four major IoT platforms, a new generation of Midea’s smart home and whole house smart solutions, and launched Midea’s first smart home appliance grading standard, and for the first time proposed the "Yuan The concept of "home" provides users with a brand-new IoT application and interactive experience. This marks Midea’s official transition from the product-centric intelligent phase to the user-centric systemic intelligent phase. A series of innovations have laid the foundation for Midea’s comprehensive intelligent technology innovation and also contributed to the R&D and industrial innovation of the smart home industry. Inject new capabilities to further assist the standardization development of the smart home industry.

The new classification standard for smart home appliances

After more than ten years of development in smart homes, in the face of various smart products on the market, how to judge the smart level of each product is difficult for many consumers to tell. At the meeting, Midea IoT launched the first home appliance classification standard,Midea's new smart products are developed in strict accordance with this grading standard, and the R&D and production of smart products are fully standardized, which has become an innovative move in the industry.

This smart home appliance classification standard launched by Midea IoT is aimed at general requirements for the evaluation of the smart performance of household and similar appliances. It classifies products from the level of smart technology application, from no smart L0 (requires excessive user intervention), basic smart L1 (Single product intelligent control), auxiliary intelligent L2 (multi-category scene linkage can be realized), advanced intelligent L3 (AI scene linkage, active service), and fully intelligent L4 (fully autonomous service) These four levels classify smart home appliances.

Xiang Jiangxu said that the intelligent classification standards for home appliances launched this time are based on Midea’s years of intelligent exploration, its own huge advantages in the category of smart home appliances, and understanding of the needs of smart users. Hope that Midea’s smart home appliances classification Standards can evoke the entire industry to work together towards the direction of deep intelligence.

This standard basically covers most of the white goods products on the market. It is mainly considered from two aspects: the degree of user control intervention and the deep learning ability of smart devices. The subdivision dimensions include device perception, decision-making, learning, Collaboration capabilities and other aspects will not only help consumers quickly determine the degree of intelligence of smart home appliances, but will also facilitate the standardized development of the home appliance smart industry, promote technological innovation and change, and standardize the smart home industry standardization process through a unified smart home standard language.

Big release of four IoT platforms

At the press conference, Midea IoT successively released four major IoT platforms, including Midea IoT operating system 1.0, Midea IoT Central 1.0, Midea AI Dialogue Development platform 1.0, Midea Internet of Things Open Platform 1.0, addressing industry pain points such as low production efficiency of smart products, insufficient data and service capabilities in middle stations, weak AI voice dialogue capabilities for home appliances, poor multi-brand compatibility, and cross-domain interoperability. Proposed solutions, which aroused market attention.

Through the Midea Internet of Things AIoT architecture,It can be seen that Midea’s intelligent implementation starts from the most basic connection layer, operating system layer, IoT platform, and IoT native application layer, and uses big data AI technology and security assurance strategies to ensure that the entire architecture realizes platform autonomous operation and supports Smart home, smart building, smart manufacturing, smart logistics, smart medical and other rich application scenarios and business sectors.

For example, with Midea’s IoT mid-stage, front-line business teams can focus more on innovation, without worrying about the basic but crucial mid-office support issues, and can help partners in different industries and different application fields to quickly and Low-cost realization of intelligence; at the same time, through the unified object model framework of the middle and Taiwan, the linkage of equipment between cross-business areas will become simpler and more efficient, which will further break down industry barriers and realize the interconnection of everything. Regardless of To C or To B business, based on Midea's mid-office capabilities in the Internet of Things, more application scenarios will be incubated in the future to empower industry innovation and development.

At the conference, witnessed by the Open Atom Open Source Foundation, the first distributed operating system in the smart home industry based on OpenHarmony 2.0-Midea IoT Operating System 1.0 was officially released. This system has greatly enhanced Midea’s core creativity in the field of smart home software, and can provide brand-new solutions to problems such as multi-brand interconnection of various products, independent collaboration between devices, cloud integration, AI interaction empowerment, etc., and reduce ecological products The cost of communication will greatly increase the collaborative innovation between the industry chains, provide developers and partners with a more convenient development environment and a more powerful application ecology, and accelerate the advent of the Midea AIoT era.

For users, the birth of Midea's Internet of Things operating system can be said to be truly helpful in realizing distributed and autonomous collaboration between "home appliances" and providing users with more convenient and smarter services. The essence of the Internet of Things system is to achieve The connection between "device and device", with the operating system, the home appliance itself can realize higher-order and more complex intelligent interactive functions, and the user is no longer so "tired" in terms of control experience. This is the essence of Midea's "Yuanjia" The ultimate goal: home appliances are computers, and equipment is the entrance.

It is worth mentioning that Midea’s open platform for the Internet of Things is the industry’s first self-developed thing model configuration platform based on the W3C Internet of Things (WoT) standard.Through the standardized equipment capability model , unified terminal operation experience, convenient plug-ins, and low-code scenarios, it can help developers of different forms to obtain software and hardware development, and can provide standardized one-stop service for the whole process. Through the Midea IoT open platform, developers can quickly realize the sharing and intercommunication of technologies, channels, users, and products, creating a truly user-centric multi-scenario, multi-entry, and multi-application comprehensive experience, and jointly discover new smart homes under the Internet of Things Blue ocean.

All of Midea's edge terminals, cloud devices and user data are operated under Midea's Internet of Things security assurance mechanism, and ensuring user information security is always the first. At present, Midea is the first in the industry to achieve the three-end smart home (Midea App, smart home appliances, and smart connection modules) that have passed the security certification of the China Network Security Center. Midea's IoT smart security solutions have passed a number of domestic and foreign markets in the United States and Europe. International authoritative security and privacy certification, giving users end-to-end full-link security and privacy protection.

Create a smart life with users

Smart home IoT is now evolving toward these trends: remote control transitions to scene linkage, closed ecosystems transition to open interconnection, and single entry control transitions to multiple Entrance control and product capabilities have changed from central control to distributed control. These trends are driving smart home appliances from passively responding to user needs to smart devices that can perceive user behavior in real time and provide active services.

In order to adapt to this trend, Midea IoT at the conference innovatively proposed the concept of "Meta Home" to summarize Midea's vision of the Internet of Things. Midea will use in-depth intelligent product research and development, whole house intelligent scene landing, and original intelligent application innovation. The main direction is to build a multi-scenario, multi-entry, multi-application cloud side-end IoT ecological platform, based on basic technologies such as perception, communication, AI, big data, and virtual reality, to realize a digital home twin and provide a new Internet of Things Application and interactive experience allow users to enjoy more in-depth intelligent services.

VR-Yuanjia integrates Midea’s powerful product capabilities and cutting-edge technology,It can provide users with a brand-new smart home experience service. For example, users can wear a VR helmet in the store to experience various whole-house smart home scenarios, which will greatly improve the user experience and store purchase conversion rate. For online channels, it can also support the mapping of real physical devices to panoramic videos on entry-level applications such as Midea Mercure App and Mini Programs, so that users can easily customize the linkage scene and combine AI voice and other technologies to provide users Create a combination of virtual and actual operating experience to improve user satisfaction.

In the smart home exhibition area at the conference site, the audience and friends can experience the beautiful VR-yuan home virtual and real linkage smart home experience. "In the future, we will also conduct research on technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and home appliance somatosensory simulation, to build a new home experience that combines virtual and reality. For example, through the combination of home appliance physical functions and artificial intelligence autonomous service capabilities, Simulate the experience of a variety of different environments, such as the seaside, mountains, dense forests, space, etc. At the same time, combined with VR/AR technology to create an immersive feeling for users visually." Wang Yueming, head of Midea IoT software development Express.

Focusing on the goal of "the first comprehensive user experience", Zhang Xiaoyi, vice president and CIO of Midea Group, delivered a keynote speech on "Smart Life Can Be More Beautiful". He believes that the previous home appliance industry is far away from users, but now it can rely on software to drive The transformation of hardware, the transformation of the existing value chain and business model to achieve "user direct access", providing a complete set of services starting from the user life cycle, covering all links such as purchase, logistics, installation, use, and service, and can also feed back intelligent manufacturing. Users recreate new value.

Zhang Xiaoyi pointed out that based on the mid-office capabilities of the US cloud sales solution, the new generation of Midea’s smart home whole house smart solution will be able to support tens of thousands of front-end stores at the same time, and can also support batches, relying on the digital platform tools under development. Home improvement designers, joint venture partners, and furniture customization companies call platform resources at the same time, allowing users to fully experience Midea’s smart home whole house smart solution regardless of any channel.

The new generation of Midea smart home can choose and match the whole house smart solution with the three characteristics of full category, full scene, and self-evolution.Including the six dimensions of smart design, smart products, smart scenes, smart services, smart housekeeping, and smart life, focusing on the needs of people in the three types of business formats: pre-installation, post-installation, and bureau reform, providing a common foundation for families with different types and needs Package + personalized expansion package, modular combination from small to large, from simple to rich can meet more personalized customization needs of users. In order to facilitate users to experience the integration of home appliances and home services. Midea Smart Home has upgraded its 2700+ stores across the country with the whole-house smart scene, and plans to build 100 offline smart life experience benchmark stores next year.

In addition to technological innovation and scenario research, Midea IoT is fully open to ecological cooperation to provide consumers with a full range of smart home services. Among them, the cooperation between Midea IoT and Huawei Hongmeng has been further deepened this year. Based on the whole house smart scene, it has realized the leap from single product cooperation to whole house intelligence and interconnection, providing consumers with whole house smart scene solutions. Up to now, Midea Hongmeng products have completed 200+ SKU coverage of all categories, and 4 million+ units are expected to be put into production.

At the same time, Midea's open ecology creates a closed-loop full-process catering ecological experience for users. Through the combination of "intelligent hardware + scientific diet content services + optimal ecological products", it has created a "product provision" to "cooking solution". "New model and healthy lifestyle." Take Midea’s smart and healthy diet as an example. In June of this year, Midea’s IoT and Mint Health reached a strategic cooperation, combined with Midea’s smart kitchen appliances to provide users with more refined nutritional information on healthy catering, and provide nutritional information on ingredients for different groups of people. The closed-loop healthy cooking diet allows users not only to eat conveniently, but also to eat healthy and delicate, and enjoy the convenience brought by the new era of beautiful food.

It is worth noting that Midea has actively carried out ecological cooperation around the " carbon neutral " strategy this year, vigorously researched and developed innovative applications of smart home appliances in energy saving and emission reduction, and took the lead in innovating with the State Grid China Electric Power Research Institute Research and become the only enterprise in the home appliance industry that applies on the hardware and software sides of the China Electric Power Research Institute demand response interactive module solution,The first batch of green smart home appliances jointly built by the two parties will soon be launched on the market.

At present, Midea IoT has absorbed 100+ heavyweight partners from AI technology, IoT security, smart hardware, content resources, Internet services and other fields, focusing on scenarios, technologies, ecology, products, and whole-house intelligence. Through openness The platform realizes seamless docking with applications in various industries, actively co-creating new user scenarios and services, and building new industry standards, new systems and new applications. In the future, on the road of exploring software-defined hardware, Midea IoT will continue to improve product capabilities, create more smart application scenarios for users, enable innovation and empower partners, and actively participate in the national energy transition to actively contribute to the realization of the 2060 carbon neutral strategy Target.

The article was submitted by a third party and has nothing to do with the position of the digital tail.