China, the winner of the tariff war, operates the world's most advanced AI-powered 'robot army'
China, the winner of the tariff war, operates the world's largest 'robot army', and China's secret weapon in the trade war is the AI-powered factory robots of the manufacturing revolution, the New York Times reported through local reporting.
To show off China's push for robot automation, a half marathon was held in Beijing on Saturday (19th) with 12,000 runners and 20 humanoid robots, and six robots finished the race.
The fastest robot marathoner was almost three times faster than the slowest robot, but China has become an international robot powerhouse. The world's most advanced AI-driven factory robots. Keith Bradsher, Beijing bureau chief, who has visited hundreds of factories in China since 2002, focused on Ningbo, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, China, and reported on the 23rd that "factories across China are being automated at a frightening rate."
"As engineers and electricians tend to multiple robots, this work improves quality while reducing manufacturing costs, which in turn will help Chinese factories keep prices low for many of their exports, giving them an advantage in the trade war and Trump's high tariffs."
China's factories are more automated than those in the United States, Germany, and Japan, and China's automation drive has been guided by government guidelines and supported by massive investment. Now, as robots replace workers, automation has positioned China to continue to dominate mass production despite its aging workforce and declining industrial workers, the New York Times analyzed.
China's robot dominance is replacing workers not only in large auto factories but also in thousands of small, independent factories in back alleys in China. “China is trying to turn robotics into a whole new business,” He Liang, founder and CEO of Yunmu Intelligent Manufacturing, one of China’s top humanoid robot makers, told the Times.
“The expectation for humanoid robots is to create another electric car industry, and from that perspective, this is a national strategy.” In Guangzhou, a commercial hub in southeastern China, Elon Li’s roadside workshop is filled with cheap ovens and barbecue equipment, along with 11 metal cutters and welders, and plans to buy $40,000 worth of AI-powered robotic arms that replicate the welding of the sides of ovens by humans using camera-equipped robot arms. “I never imagined I would invest in automation before,” Li told the Times. “Human workers can only work eight hours a day, but machines can work 24 hours a day.”
The same robotic arm cost $140,000 in a foreign product four years ago; it now costs just $40,000 in a Chinese product.
Ningbo-based electric car maker Zeekr's factory has grown from 500 robots four years ago to 820 now, with plans to add more.
Zeekr’s factory uses more robots to bring panels to the assembly line, where hundreds of robotic arms, staffed by up to 16 people, perform a complex dance to weld the bodywork, and the welding area, called the “dark factory,” operates on its own, with no human workers or lights on.
Factories in China still employ vast numbers of workers and are the mainstay of manufacturing. Even with automation, workers are still needed to do quality control and install some parts that require manual dexterity, such as wiring harnesses.
Workers are hired to do things that cameras and computers can’t do alone. Before even painting a car, workers touch the car with gloved hands and sand down any minor blemishes.
Some of the later stages of quality control are automated with the help of AI. At Zeekr’s factories, a dozen high-resolution cameras take pictures of each car near the end of the assembly line, and computers compare the images to a vast database of correctly assembled cars and notify factory workers if any discrepancies are found, a task that takes a few seconds to complete.
“Most of our colleagues’ jobs are sitting in front of a computer monitor,” Pinky Wu, a Zeekr employee, told the Times.
Zeekr’s new office building in Shanghai features a variety of interiors and surfaces, with AI used by designers and architects.
Designer Carrie Li uses AI to analyze how different interior surfaces intersect in a car. “I have more free time to open my mind and explore what fashion trends I want to incorporate into my car interiors,” he told the Times.
Chinese companies have started by acquiring overseas suppliers of advanced robotics, such as Germany’s Kuka, and moving their operations to China.
When Volkswagen opened its electric car factory in Hefei a year ago, it had just one robot made in Germany and 1,074 in Shanghai.
China’s factory robotics was one of 10 industries targeted by the “Made in China 2025” initiative announced a decade ago.
Over the past four years, Chinese state-owned banks have increased their lending to industrial borrowers by a whopping $1.9 trillion, mostly to build new factories but also to replace existing ones, the Times found. Chinese universities produce about 350,000 mechanical engineering graduates each year, as well as electrical engineers, welders and other trained technicians, while U.S. universities graduate about 45,000 mechanical engineers each year.
“Finding skilled workers has been one of the biggest challenges,” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robotics officer at Agility Robotics, a leading U.S. robot manufacturer, about the importance of skilled engineers in robotics.
“I was one of two mechanical engineers,” Hurst told the Times, adding that he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh.