Beware of the low-end tendency of the robotics industry

In recent years, under the influence of multiple factors such as rising labor costs, an aging population, and transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, China's robotics industry has developed rapidly. However, with the rapid growth of the robot industry, the number of companies has grown rapidly. In some places, there has been a tendency to attract investment, light technology innovation, and training of light talents. Homogenized competition has intensified, and the industry has become “small, scattered, weak” with quality assurance. The system of fair competition with the market needs to be improved.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there are currently more than 800 enterprises involved in the production and integration of robotics in China, of which more than 200 are robotic body manufacturing companies. Most of the companies are mainly assembling and processing, and the products are mainly low-end robots. According to incomplete statistics, in the past two years, the robotics industry has issued a total of 77 local policies and 42 industrial parks under construction and construction. The long-term goal of developing the local robot industry adds up to even several times the target of the national robot industry.

It stands to reason that companies that do not possess core technologies should be eliminated in the normal market environment. However, due to the introduction of industrial support policies in some localities, some uncompetitive enterprises can rely on subsidies and preferential policies to survive. Good companies are like this. It is not easy to grow in the environment. Some people in the industry lamented that the robot industry has already shown signs of "bad money driving away good money," and low-level, redundant construction of high-end industries has emerged.

In view of this, it is imperative to achieve major breakthroughs in robot high-end products and key components, and to achieve a significant increase in robot reliability, market share, and competitiveness of leading companies. First, we must speed up the establishment of a sound robot industry standard system. All along, product quality and reliability are major bottlenecks that restrict the development of robots and key components in China. The lack of industry standards is one of the important causes of uneven quality. In accordance with the urgency of industrial development, we must study and formulate a set of national, industrial, and community standards for robots, build and improve the robot industry standard system, and actively participate in the revision of international standards.

Second, it is necessary to increase investment in independent research and development and build an innovation system for the robot industry. At present, more than 90% of China's robotic companies have an annual production value of less than 100 million yuan, and there is a clear gap in core technology. We should make full use of and integrate existing scientific and technological resources and research and development forces to set up a robot-oriented innovation center for the whole industry, focusing on industry-leading basic research and applied basic research, and promote the transfer, diffusion, and commercialization of scientific and technological achievements, and create “political, production, "Study, research, and use" closely integrated collaborative innovation carrier. In the core parts of precision reducers, servo motors, actuators, and controllers used in robots, it is necessary to strive for the performance, accuracy, and reliability to reach the level of similar foreign products.

Furthermore, local governments must differentiate and develop according to their respective advantages. It is necessary to correctly grasp the regularity, objectivity and direction of robot technology and market development, soberly understand the resources of the local development of the robot industry, and encourage the focus of the policy to tilt towards technological R&D, talent accumulation, differentiation, and avoid low-level repeated construction. . It is better to form a high-end professional enterprise and a symbiotic structure of division of labor, such as machine vision, positioning technology, perception technology, human-machine interface technology, and control technology. As long as we can achieve the ultimate, there will be a huge market, but also more conducive to training the company's long-term development of the core competitiveness.

To achieve the sustainable development of China's robot industry, we must adhere to innovation-driven development principles and strive to reverse the development of low-end development. This requires the joint efforts of governments, industry organizations, companies, research institutions, and other parties. With the support of related plans, we will strive to achieve new breakthroughs in the robot industry during the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period.