Shanghai plans to expand robot industry

Shanghai has unveiled a plan to promote its robot industry in the next three years, including having ten industrial leading robot brands, realizing 100 robot application scenes, and expanding the city's robot industrial scale to 100 billion yuan ($14.75 billion) by 2025, according to the official sources.

The targets are part of the city's efforts in spearheading high-quality development of the local industrial industry, promoting the in-depth integration between robot and artificial intelligence, and making intelligent robots an enabler to shore up various industries, said Tang Wenkan, deputy director of Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization during a meeting with the press, on Tuesday.

According to Tang, being the nation's bellwether in robot industrial development, Shanghai's industrial robot sector and service robot sector have made great progress in the past year

Despite the impact of COVID-19, Shanghai saw its industrial robot output grow 6 percent to surpass 75,000 units in 2022, topping all Chinese cities, while the service robots also realized widespread application in the fields of medical care, construction, agriculture, commerce, home appliance and emergencies, Tang said.

In addition to the city's existing three national benchmark smart factories, ten city-level benchmark intelligent factories, and 100 local-level smart plants, Shanghai looks to have 20 city-level benchmark intelligent factories and 200 local-level smart plants. Shanghai aims to raise the robot density by 100 robots per 10,000 persons in the next three years, said Wu Chunping, an official from the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization).

Robot density, a key gauge to measure the adoption of automation in manufacturing, is the amount of robots per 10,000 persons used in the manufacturing industry.

Shanghai's current robot density is 260, more than twice the global average, Wu Jincheng, director of Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization said during a news conference in Shanghai in September.

In a bid to nurture a batch of well-known robot brands and guide the city's robot industry to the direction of being more intelligent and market-oriented, Shanghai has handpicked the first batch of benchmark enterprises and demonstrative scenes that include 41 robot brands and 52 application scenes, Tang added.