China’s Leap into Robotics for Industry

Angela Shen is back at it, this time with a multi-part series on industrial robotics and AI. If you missed her first ChinaTalk feature on biotech, check it out here. At the 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing, attendees cheered as a humanoid robot scored a goal in a fully robotic football match. Visitors could play a bot in Chinese chess and rock-paper-scissors, enjoy robotic performances of Yangqin melodies and martial arts, and marvel at robots assisting complex osteotomy and endoscopic surgeries. With the humanoid robot market surging 86% between 2022 and 2023, these mesmerizing displays make a bold statement about China’s big ambitions for robotics. The global robotics industry is projected to reach upward of US$42 billion in 2024, of which China will make up about US$8.47 billion (~20%). Service robots account for over three-quarters of this projected market volume, and industrial robots account for the rest.1 While China shows improvement in both types of robotics, industrial

Angela Shen is back at it, this time with a multi-part series on industrial robotics and AI. If you missed her first ChinaTalk feature on biotech, check it out here. At the 2024 World Robot Conference in Beijing, attendees cheered as a humanoid robot scored a goal in a fully robotic football match. Visitors could play a bot in Chinese chess and rock-paper-scissors, enjoy robotic performances of Yangqin melodies and martial arts, and marvel at robots assisting complex osteotomy and endoscopic surgeries. With the humanoid robot market surging 86% between 2022 and 2023, these mesmerizing displays