Global media focus丨US media: China’s robot industry has made amazing progress

The American "Foreign Affairs" magazine published an article on October 12 stating that China's robotics industry has made amazing progress, and China has included embodied intelligence into its national key development strategy. On its development path, China strives to integrate its software and hardware advantages. Chinese robots may influence the direction of the artificial intelligence competition.

The article took the test of Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot running 9.39 seconds in the 100-meter preliminaries at the Second World Humanoid Robot Games in August this year as an example, pointing out that this test showed the amazing progress of China's robot industry. China’s achievements in the field of robotics have become the core of China’s continuously evolving artificial intelligence strategy.

The article said that the Chinese government has included embodied intelligence, 6G, and quantum technology as "future industries" and listed it as a key direction in the "15th Five-Year Plan", the economic and social development blueprint for 2030.

At present, China has mastered several key links in the emerging supply chain of embodied intelligence. For example, Chinese companies produce about 80% of the world's lidar sensors. This technology is the basis for autonomous vehicles, warehousing robots, and precision agricultural equipment to achieve three-dimensional mapping and autonomous navigation.

According to the article, in order to accelerate the development of intelligent robots, the central government guides local governments to explore innovation incentive measures. There are already signs that the attractiveness of the intelligent robot industry continues to increase and is expected to spread rapidly. For example, the article states that more than two-thirds of Yushu Technology's four-legged robots (robot dogs) are sold in industrial and consumer scenarios such as factory safety inspections and accompanying elderly people living alone. In 2022, this proportion will be less than one-third. If robot companies can make good use of government support, IPO fundraising and funds from product sales, more intelligent robots will be put into commercial use in the next few years. Once scale is established, domestic manufacturing companies will purchase robots to deploy production lines, generate revenue and real scene data, and help embodied intelligent companies iterate products faster.

The article analyzes that the United States focuses on the research and development of digital artificial intelligence such as large language models; while China focuses on integrating the advantages of software and hardware. In terms of hardware, China's complete manufacturing base can become a training ground for artificial intelligence, and data from real scenarios will continue to feed back artificial intelligence systems. Chinese companies can rely on the huge domestic manufacturing industry and large-scale robot implementation to collect real-world data and form data advantages that are difficult to match. In the software track, top domestic laboratories are also actively developing large language models. Unlike other countries, China has simultaneously promoted artificial intelligence research and development in the physical world and is far ahead in this field.

The article believes that although the United States has a leading advantage in the field of cutting-edge models, the real key capabilities are robot manufacturing, deploying robots in manufacturing and logistics and other scenarios, and generating sufficient data to continuously train robots. And these are precisely the current shortcomings of the United States. China can quickly catch up with or even surpass the United States by implementing artificial intelligence in the real economy and collecting massive amounts of real-life scene data.