CES 2018:AI,Drones,AR,Autonomous driving

AI/Robotics: iFlytek will demonstrate an intelligent earphone, Mobius (Fig 2),embedded with a powerful translation system and voice recognition technology.

Megvii’s visual solutions are compatible with mobile platforms for imageenhancement, facial recognition and 3D Animoji, with key partners such asHuawei, Vivo and Xiaomi. Horizon Robotics is dedicated to the developmentof AI chips to power smart home and self-driving vehicles. UBTECH has aservice robot, Lynx, embedded with the Amazon Alexa service.

Drones: We expect to see more new drone designs and commercial dronemodels in the event, consistent with our view on the drone industry (link).

DJI will put the entry-level agriculture drone, Phantom 4 RTK (Real-TimeKinematic) for sale, with GPS accuracy improved to <5cm vs standard drones’500cm. SolarDrone is launching a solar-powered quadcopter (Fig 3),extending the flight time from <30mins to hours via lightweight solar panels.

Autonomous driving: Byton, backed by Hon Hai and Tencent, launches itsfirst EV, Concept (Figs 4-5), equipped with Level 3 autonomous driving initiallyand a 50-inch display as the center console. The model will be sold with astarting price at ~US$45k in China in 2019 and the US in 2020. Baiduintroduces Apollo 2.0, the open-source autonomous driving platform,allowing vehicles to drive autonomously on simple urban streets.

VR/AR: HTC will unveil a new VR device, Vive Pro, with higher resolution(2880x1600 dual OLED) to enable clearer text rendering and graphics.

Xiaomi releases a standalone VR headset for the Chinese marketspecifically, Mi VR Standalone (Fig 6), in cooperation with Oculus. Pico bringsits standalone VR headset to the show, Pico Neo (Fig 7, link), while Xloongwill launch new AR glasses. Goertek has been a strong manufacturingpartner with major VR/AR brands like PS VR, Oculus and Pico.

Semiconductors: We see China semi to be driven by auto electronics, IoT,mobile and infrastructure, with AI to be increasingly critical (link). Attendingsemi companies include ASE, MediaTek, Goodix, Realtek, Allwinner andHiSilicon, while MediaTek will announce NeuroPilot AI platform for edgecomputing, and launch several AI products such as smart display SoCssupporting AI vision and a 12nm SoC for 4K streaming Dongle.