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China has become the world’s largest market for industrial robotics and the fastest-growing market worldwide, surging 21% to $5.4 billion in 2019, while global sales hit $16.5 billion with 422,000 robotic units shipped, according to the International Federation of Robotics in Frankfurt.
Emil Hauch Jensen, vice president of sales at Mobile Industrial Robots in Shanghai, told CNBC that one robot that can work a 24-hour shift can replace three workers and cost in the range of $43,000 to $72,000. A survey of selected companies by the China Development Research Foundation in September showed that companies had cut 30% to 40% of their labor force between 2015 to 2017 due to automation.
The outbreak of the hypercontagious respiratory illness COVID-19 (known colloquially as Coronavirus), which has brough China’s economy to a standstill as a result of quarantines equivalent to more than 50 million people, is now playing a role in this robotic rollout. Precautionary curbs on traditional transportation and the desire to avoid as much human to human contact as possible has provided an interesting testing ground for the country’s automation ambitions.
One of the key elements of the quarantine has been attempts at isolation and containment. GermFalcon’s cleaning bots have been deployed to clean airplanes that helped many international travelers and migrants evacuate China. On inbound flights arriving from China into LAX recently, the disinfectant bots used ultraviolet scans to make sure the planes were not infected. Hospitals in China are also being helped by European robots from the likes of UVD Robots, a spin-out of Danish startup Blue Ocean Robotics. Their self-driving disinfection robots, already deployed in Chinese hospitals, use ultraviolet light to disinfect and kill viruses and bacteria autonomously, curbing the spread of Coronavirus.
JD Logistics is using medicine delivery robots outside of hospitals. They operate autonomously and can navigate through traffic. The first bot delivered supplies to the Wuhan Ninth Hospital In February, prior to beginning daily deliveries. JD has also become the first company to use drones for consumer deliveries in China. With the typical boat delivery routes over Baiyang Lake in northern China’s Hubei province disrupted by the epidemic, couriers would need to detour over 100 km to deliver to this village via land-based routes. It took the drone just a few minutes to fly about 2 km from Xidi dock to a village on the other side of the lake. The drone dropped the parcels at a fixed point in the village, where customers picked them up without human-to-human contact, better protecting both customers and JD couriers.
Shenzhen-based MicroMultiCopter, has deployed their own drones to transport medical samples and conduct thermal imaging. Tech company Antwork is doing the same in Xinchang County, as parent firm Terra Drone has said that using drones was 50% faster than roads. This is similar to drone delivery projects MRP has previously covered from Alphabet’s Inc.’s Wing service, as well as UPS partner Matternet.
AI is lending a hand in diagnosing the illness. Several hospitals in China are using AI-based software from the company Infervision to scan through CT images of patients’ lungs to look for signs of COVID-19, the infection caused by the novel coronavirus. At the same time, Vox reports that the coronavirus epidemic has also inspired several drug companies to use artificial intelligence-powered drug discovery platforms to search for possible treatments. That process can involve using AI to find entirely new molecules that might be capable of treating the pneumonia-like illness, or mining through databases of already-approved drugs (for other illnesses) that might also work against Coronavirus.
Bloomberg reports that China Mobile Ltd. donated one 5G robot each to both Wuhan Union Hospital and Tongji Tianyou Hospital last month, according to a report by ThePaper.cn. Riding the 5G network, these assistant bots carry a disinfectant tank on board and will be used to safely clean hospital areas along a predetermined route, reducing the risk to medical personnel.
China counts more than 800 robot makers, including major players SIASUN and DJI Innovations. While not directly related to the Coronavirus, cleaning robot maker Beijing Roborock Technology ironically jumped 85% in its STAR Market debut last month after an IPO oversubscribed more than 3,000 times.
The country is on track to account for 45% of all industrial robot shipments by 2021, up from 39% in 2019, predicts the robotics research group. In the past, China has lagged behind other nations in robotic workforces, counting 97 industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers, half as many industrial robots as the U.S. and one-seventh as many as South Korea, according to the robotics group.
Financial services company Huachuang Securities Co. believes even more robots are in China’s immediate future. Pointing to National Bureau of Statistics data suggesting that domestic production of industrial robots increased by 15.3% in the month of December, they predict similarly fast growth in the current quarter, according to a report published by Finance Sina.
While many have been concerned about how quickly major firms operating in China can bounce back, deployments of human labor-saving robots will position these companies to recover their production much faster than they could have in previous years.
CNBC writes that Apple supplier Foxconn has been moving to automate 30% of its one million factory jobs in China by 2020, which could prove fortuitous. Foxconn cut 60,000 factory jobs from its 1.2 million China workforce in 2016, but further reductions have been slow to develop. Alibaba’s logistics affiliate Cainiao, which opened China’s largest automated warehouse in Wuxi in 2018, uses 700 robots to streamline and speed up order fulfillment. |
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