Leiphone (WeChat public account: Leiphone) has exclusively learned that 3D vision perception company Orbbec decided internally in mid-September (mid-month 9) to cut its lawn mower robot ODM business. However, the vision module product line is unaffected, and perception modules for outdoor robots are still proceeding as normal.
Looking back at its path into the market, the lawn mower ODM business was originally placed with high hopes. The project was strongly pushed by the former sales head of the robotics business, and Orbbec invested whole-machine R&D resources for it, securing an order from a customer in Shanghai. But cumulative actual shipments were only a few thousand units, far below expectations.
According to people familiar with the matter, cutting the ODM business was a timely stop-loss under the overlap of multiple factors, for three reasons.
First, the new FCC rules. On July 28 this year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) placed "advanced robotic devices produced outside the United States" on a controlled list, and lawn mower robots happened to fall within the definitional boundary; on September 11, the FCC issued new equipment authorization rules, further tightening the authorization path for such devices. The North American market access threshold rose sharply.
Second, the track is overcrowded. Lawn mowers were originally the fastest-growing category among yard robots, but this also attracted a large number of floor-cleaning robot and pool robot manufacturers to enter and make lawn mowers, intensifying industry involution.
Third, the big-customer logic failed to work out. "It didn't latch onto a strong partner." Whether the ODM model can succeed depends not only on technical capability, but even more on the sales volume and channel capabilities of downstream brands. The customer's shipment volume couldn't support an ODM product line.
Cutting the lawn mower ODM business means Orbbec's role in the lawn mower track retreats from "entering to make whole machines" back to "supplying perception solutions upstream." This is also a microcosm of Orbbec's resources retracting toward its perception main business.
Currently, Orbbec mainly has three product lines: robotics, scanning and innovation, and biometrics. Robotics is the absolute focus; the lawn mower ODM was previously assigned to the robotics product line and afterward promoted in coordination across the entire sales system. As the company's "all-in embodied" strategy advances, customers are almost all robot manufacturers, differing only in industry scenarios, and the boundaries between product lines are no longer as clear as before.
Compared with continuing to invest in lawn mower robot whole-machine ODM, Orbbec will next focus more on embodied intelligence data collection equipment, which fits Orbbec's capability boundaries better than whole-machine contract manufacturing.
The exit of lawn mower ODM adds another footnote to upstream sensor companies entering to make whole machines. Between perception solution providers and whole-machine brands stand triple thresholds of customers, channels, and compliance—not every company can cross them.
The author of this article has long focused on smart hardware and consumer robots; feel free to add the author's WeChat MOON_ERS to exchange ideas. Lei Feng
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