Welding robots work cooperatively in a workshop of Durable New-Energy Auto Co. in Weihai, Shandong Province, on November 11 (XINHUA)

China's importance in the global robotics industry is increasing, with more companies moving to develop industrial and service robots, along with artificial intelligence. Even some property tycoons are getting on board and investing in the fast-growing sector.

China Vanke, the country's largest property developer by sales, is cooperating with world-renowned research centers to develop robots to do everything from sweep floors and guard its properties to address labor shortage and rising wages.

As Chinese property developers struggle with lackluster sales and tighter industry margins, Vanke, like many others, is looking toward premium concierge services to attract customers. The future of the industry, the company said, might be staffed with robots to provide services to their clients.

"We estimate that with today's growth and the changes in China's labor supply, at least 30 percent of our jobs will be replaced by robots," Vanke's Chairman Wang Shi said.

Indeed, eight robot chefs already work in the restaurants serving Vanke's developments, Wang said in August, and the company plans to open a hotel entirely managed by robots in the southern city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province in 2017, he added.

China has recently progressed in developing its robotic technologies, ranking as the top industrial robot market worldwide for two consecutive years. The country also accounts for one quarter of global robotic sales, according to a report announced by China Robot Industry Alliance in 2014.

Liu Jinchang, a research fellow at the Hi-Tech Research Development Center under the Ministry of Science and Technology, attributes the boom to government policies and investments from various sources.

Anthony Neal-Graves, Vice President of the Internet of Things Group at Intel Corp., expects the market for robots to increase 20 percent annually worldwide, while the Asia-Pacific region is estimated to grow 25 percent annually. The bulk of the increase in demand will come from China, he said.

A robotic interpreter developed by iFLYTEK, a Chinese software company focused on artificial intelligence technologies, offers simultaneous translation for the speakers at the opening ceremony of the RoboCup 2015, an international robotics competition, in Hefei, Anhui Province, on July 19 (XINHUA)

From factories to homes  

Fifteen years ago, the first industrial robot in China went into service in a factory in Foshan, Guangdong, responsible for spraying glaze on ceramic bathroom accessories. Since then, robotic applications have expanded from precision manufacturing, such as electronics and automobiles, to labor-intensive industries, such as textiles and petroleum chemicals. And the number of uses is expected to grow.

"Robots will be employed in more and more sectors, including home appliances, rail transportation and shipbuilding, as more traditional sectors are willing to embrace the new technology in their production," said Li Shuchong, President of CCID Consulting Co. Ltd., a Beijing-based IT industry consultancy.

According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), 56,000 industrial robots were sold in China in 2014, a 54 percent increase over 2013, while China produced 12,050 such robots, up 26.2 percent year-on-year.

Global robotic trade value exceeds $9.5 billion, according to IFR statistics. But when combined with relevant software, auxiliary equipment and application systems, total trade rises to more than $29 billion.

As automobiles and electronic factories continue to automate, the IFR predicts Chinese factories will employ the most robots by 2017.

In the meantime, China has national institutions and research teams focusing on artificial intelligence (AI). Many Internet giants, including online search engine Baidu Inc. and e-commerce site JD.com, are developing their own AI technologies.

Guangdong-based home appliance maker Midea Group started using robots in its production in 2011 to transport compressors, package air conditioners and conduct performance tests. Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer, increased its industrial robotics applications, research and development in recent years. The company plans to automate 30 percent of production lines in its factories on the Chinese mainland by 2020 and sell its robot Foxbot to other manufacturers.

While Midea and Foxconn mainly utilize and develop what's been called "intelligent industrial robots," service robots like the ones Vanke are researching are increasingly drawing the public's attention. Although service robots have more limited uses than their industrial counterparts, they are being integrated into the daily lives of more and more ordinary people in China.

"Generally speaking, China has acquired the research and development capabilities that cover the entire industrial chain of service robots. Robots are rapidly expanding from industrial areas to home services, medical rehabilitation, education and entertainment. With expanded areas of application, China's service robots will surely witness a surge [in popularity]," said Xu Xiaolian, Secretary General of the Chinese Institute of Electronics.

Robots designed for cleaning, cooking, nursing the elderly and delivering medical treatment have seen a rapid growth in sales, Xu said. And robots are being developed in other sectors where automated machines can benefit people in their day-to-day lives.

Despite the rosy prospects, experts and industry insiders say three barriers stand in the way of China's long-term development of service robots: a lack of core technologies, high development costs and brand cultivation.

"We have some of the core technologies, but the cost to realize that in mass production is too high, while for some low-cost production plans, the technology is not good enough. So, it's either hi-tech or low cost. You can't have both," said Chen Xiaoping, a professor of robotics technology at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui Province. "In the meantime, there are no big names in China's robotic industry that are on par with their foreign peers."

One solution, Chen said, is for the government to cultivate famous brands by supporting several fast-developing firms in their competition against foreign rivals.

And the time to act is now with the upcoming three-to-five years anticipated to be the prime time to develop advanced, multi-functional service robots, rather than affordable models, according to Li Ruifeng, Deputy Director of the Robotics Research Institute at Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang Province.

Li said that although the service robot market is in its beginning stages, the value of the sector's global market will amount to $46.18 billion by 2017 due to surging demand, and the national strategy moving forward will be to develop intelligent robots.

"As a latecomer, China must speed up the development of service robots," Li noted, warning that businesses eyeing the market should already have the core technologies and industrial chains before investing.

A visitor shakes hands with a robot at the World Robot Conference 2015 in Beijing on November 24 (XINHUA)

Replacing human labor 

Investors and potential market players see the burgeoning industry as an opportunity, but workers are being replaced or seeing their jobs eliminated entirely.

The manufacturing-heavy Pearl River Delta region in south China's Guangdong has the largest influx of migrant workers in the country. But thanks to rising labor costs, a large-scale replacement of human labor with industrial robots is taking place in the manufacturing sector, and local governments are supporting the change with preferential policies and subsidies.

Guangdong started encouraging businesses to replace their human workers with robots in 2015 and hopes 1,950 will make the change by 2017. Leading businesses will be selected as pilot companies to cultivate the factories manufacturing the robots, and 943 billion yuan ($148 billion) will be earmarked by the provincial government to improve industrial technologies over the three years.

East China's coastal provinces are also moving fast to replace their workers with robots. Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, is pushing businesses to replace tedious and strenuous manual labor with automated and intelligent equipment. In 2013 and 2014, the city handed out awards to 76 companies --mainly in the equipment manufacturing, food processing and packaging, apparel and textile sectors--for their achievements in replacing their workers with robots.

"Replacing human labor with robots is increasingly popular throughout provinces in the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta regions where the manufacturing industry is more developed," said Shi Jinhao, a senior researcher with China Electronics Technology Group Corp. "Local governments are offering subsidies for the replacement, so that robots are employed in the production lines of both big and small businesses. Without a doubt, the trend will continue."

Zuo Shiquan, director of the Equipment Manufacturing Industry Research Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, thinks the rise in labor costs is inevitable as China moves from a middle-income nation to a high-income one. But that's not the only reason for replacing human workers with robots. Robots are able to manufacture products with higher quality and more consistency, Zuo said.

The replacement is also in line with the intrinsic requirements that high-end precision manufacturing demands, said Zhang Lingyan, an analyst for the equipment manufacturing industry with CCID Consulting Co. Ltd.

Although China utilizes a large number of robots each year, the number of robots in use is far lower than in advanced industrial nations. An IFR report said that in China, every 10,000 workers have access to 30 robots, much lower than the world average of 62. South Korea has the highest density of robots in use, with every 10,000 workers using 437 robots in production, 15 times that of China.

And more businesses are making the move as they upgrade their production lines.

"China's economic transformation and upgrading coincide with the boom of the robotic market," said Zuo, who predicts China will consume 494,300 robots by 2020, creating a market for robotic parts valued at 300 billion yuan ($46.95 billion).

Researchers from Tianjin University test multi-purpose crawling robots in Tianjin on November 19 (XINHUA)

Increasing intelligence  

In the meantime, China needs to develop its AI and make robots smarter if it wants to revolutionize the industry.

"Right now, robots are not smart enough. A sweeping robot shares the same level of intelligence as a bug," said Ye Chen, CEO of DFRobot, a Shanghai-based developer and manufacturer of robotic products. "In most cases, service robots only have one function and are not smart enough. To solve that problem, certain technological bottlenecks have to be broken."

Experts claim that the problem is caused by constraints in China's AI development.

AI purports to have similar capabilities as human intelligence in the future, meaning robots can learn from mistakes. But the machines still have a long way to go before reaching that level of capacity and currently lack the ability to reason, learn, analyze, judge and perceive the world as humans do.

"Right now, robots are nothing more than automated machines. They don't have intelligence in a real sense," Zhu Pinpin, cofounder of Xiaoi, an indigenous robotic brand in China.

Zhu admitted that Chinese developers have neglected research on robotic intelligence amid long-term focuses on robotic movement.

Professor Zhao Jie, director of the Robotics Research Institute at Harbin Institute of Technology, agrees with Zhu, saying the nature of robots should be to let machines do people's jobs, including making and executing decisions to help people achieve their own personal life and production goals.

Liu Chenlin, a senior researcher with the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes the concept of what a robot is will change as technology develops.

"Pattern recognition based on deep learning and big data is a major direction. In the future, the integration between pattern recognition and AI will realize multiple functions, including content recognition, adaptive learning, sample learning, multi-modal learning and multiple-task cooperation," Liu said.

The academic and business worlds are working to raise robot's intelligence levels, according to presentations at a national conference on AI development held in July. The goal is to evolve robots from just moving freely to listening and speaking freely and ultimately being able to understand and think.

"Our goal is to give robots the ability to think independently," said Hu Yu, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK, a software company focused on AI technologies in Hefei.

According to University of Science and Technology of China robotics technology professor Chen, the government is playing an important role in the process by increasing research and development investments to increase robot intelligence.

"Technologies such as cloud computing and big data are being employed to tackle this bottleneck," he said.

Copyedited by Bryan Michael Galvan

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