This Is Robotics: Radio News #36 (March 2025)

This Is Robotics: Radio News

INTRO:

Here at This Is Robotics, we have our very own March Madness championship series with teams vying for the GenAI Trophy. The brackets of contenders are set: ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Gemini, Alibaba’s Qwen, Tencent’s T1, and of course the Cinderella team of the playoffs, DeepSeek, which has already crashed Wall Street for a trillion dollars.

Our lead story for March is one that generated a ton of email both pro and con plus a pile of commentary. It was a special report just last week in Asian Robotics Review called The Rise of China's Robotics Industry: Modernize or Perish!

It got a ton of reaction. Some bad, but most was overwhelmingly good. Even former naysayers were impressed saying things like “don’t like the form of government, but got to hand it to them: they are hard workers who came up with a great plan.

We’ve been following this story for seven years. See the link in our show notes for How China Became a Robotics Powerhouse 2015-2025.

In fact, this month we are juxtaposing China’s rise in industrial robotics with America allowing 50 domestic industrial robot builders go bust. One of them, a wonderful Cincinnati Milacron vowed to become the world’s biggest and best. Our government watched them all die off one by one. America can’t ever let that happen again. The very last of the 50 was Adept Technologies, remember them? They hung on the longest but finally Adept Technologies was acquired by Omron in 2015.

That juxtaposition about the rise of one and the fall of the other is our final story for March.

OUR FEATURE STORY:

The Rise of China's Robotics Industry: Modernize or Perish!

Unlike most developed nations trying to automate themselves, China set out a bold plan (emphasis on “plan”), which it has stuck to for a decade of ever-rising success

How China Became a Robotics Powerhouse 2015-2025.

Busy hands

Every nation knows that big undertakings take big money that’s only available from big government, especially a nation the size of China.

Although many industrialized nations have paid lip service to the critical importance of robot-driven automation, few have actually committed to it and taken action, and none have achieved success anywhere the equal of China’s.

In addition to China, only two other of the world’s industrialized nations have developed distinct plans to automate their respective countries using robots and robotics technology. Korea’s 4th Intelligent Robot Basic Plan (2024-2028) is up and running successfully and growing; Japan’s New Robot Strategy, announced in 2015 (running 2016-2020), is mostly a paper plan with limited national success to show for itself.

China is no stranger to massive undertakings. It’s been regularly pulling off mind-boggling projects since the Yellow Emperor…millennia ago. In modern times, beginning in 1979, the rapid transformation of Shenzhen from a small fishing village to a global tech hub kicked off a mega building spree. The Three Gorges Dam is another, along with the largest high-speed train system in the world, the Kela Power Station is yet another, then there’s the South-North Water Transfer Project, plus ten thousand other engineering projects since the 1980s.

Former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping felt confident that as long as the Chinese people kept their hands busy and continued to work together on large development projects China would be just fine. He seems to have been correct.

Automating China may be the most ambitious undertaking yet. And it all begins with and depends on robots. In a 2014 speech, Xi Jinping called for a ‘r

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