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Robotics China

China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories (msn.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the some-assembly-required dept.
The U.S. and China "are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker," the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries."

"The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at a conference in March, adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all." China's government has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. "Embodied" AI is listed as a priority of a new $138 billion state venture investment fund, encouraging private-sector investors and companies to pile into the business. It looks like the beginning of a familiar tale. Chinese companies make most of the world's EVs, ships and solar panels — in each case, propelled by government subsidies and friendly regulations. "They have more companies developing humanoids and more government support than anyone else. So, right now, they may have an edge," said Jeff Burnstein [president of the Association for Advancing Automation, a trade group in Ann Arbor, Michigan]....

Humanoid robots need three-dimensional data to understand physics, and much of it has to be created from scratch. That is where China has a distinct edge: The country is home to an immense number of factories where humanoid robots can absorb data about the world while performing tasks. "The reason why China is making rapid progress today is because we are combining it with actual applications and iterating and improving rapidly in real scenarios," said Cheng Yuhang, a sales director with Deep Robotics, one of China's robot startups. "This is something the U.S. can't match." UBTech, the startup that is training humanoid robots to sort and carry auto parts, has partnerships with top Chinese automakers including Geely... "A problem can be solved in a month in the lab, but it may only take days in a real environment," said a manager at UBTech...

With China's manufacturing prowess, a locally built robot could eventually cost less than half as much as one built elsewhere, said Ming Hsun Lee, a Bank of America analyst. He said he based his estimates on China's electric-vehicle industry, which has grown rapidly to account for roughly 70% of global EV production. "I think humanoid robots will be another EV industry for China," he said. The UBTech robot system, called Walker S, currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars including software, according to people close to the company. UBTech plans to deliver 500 to 1,000 of its Walker S robots to clients this year, including the Apple supplier Foxconn. It hopes to increase deliveries to more than 10,000 in 2027.

Few companies outside China have started selling AI-powered humanoid robots. Industry insiders expect the competition to play out over decades, as the robots tackle more-complicated environments, such as private homes.
The article notes "several" U.S. humanoid robot producers, including the startup Figure. And robots from Amazon's Agility Robotics have been tested in Amazon warehouses since 2023. "The U.S. still has advantages in semiconductors, software and some precision components," the article points out.

But "Some lawmakers have urged the White House to ban Chinese humanoids from the U.S. and further restrict Chinese robot makers' access to American technology, citing national-security concerns..."

China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories More | Reply

China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories

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  • They're called "Chinese".

    • Robot humor from 1954: The Midas Plague (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Sunday March 30, 2025 @09:27PM (#65270665) Homepage

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      ""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. ..."

      Although, I outlined a different possibility here in 2010 (inspired by Marshall Brain's Manna story):
      "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • Karl Marx wrote all there is to write about the relationship of labor (people) and capital (including robots) in the 1850s-70s.

        All utopian and dystopian sci-fi is basically a regurgitation of small bits from the great original.

        • Merrikins were not allowed to read Das Kapital, which was a really bad series of economics books. Adam Smith did a better job of it.

          • Marx did an analysis of what the real world is like.

            Adam Smith imagined some utopia that just doesn't exist.

            That's why Adam Smith is suitable only for the introductory economics textbooks, it is much simpler than necessary.

            But people still massively fail to understand it.

        • With smart robots, the following two economic and political systems are obsolte:
          1. Capitalism as a source of trickle-down wealth via employment.
          2. Marxism which sees all value as having been generated by human labor (and thus should be returned fairly to laborers).

          With general AI and flexibly capable smart robots, resource extraction and production (and management of that, and many service jobs also) can happen with very little human labor. Negligible amounts.

          So we are faced with new socioeconomic problems,

          • With general AI and flexibly capable smart robots

            Luckily for ole Karl, these are and will remain a staple of the sci-fi books for the foreseeable future, which seriously devalues the need to discuss anything one might say following from this premise.

    • Could you BE any more racist?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        personally i thought it was directed at the approach of the government treating its people as robots, not a dig at the people themselves.

    • I cannot imagine China as a country with a shortage of hands, but their birthrate is actually collapsing.

  • "If new technology will inevitably cannibalize sales from old technology, we should be happy to eat ourselves." I'm not sure if that's a Tim Cook aphorism or a Steve Jobs aphorism, but I know I've heard it mentioned, particularly with respect to the iPhone eating the iPod market (where the iPod was the first big popular i-device.)

    Certainly humanoid robots have the potential to put a lot of Chinese workers out of work.

    • Neo-Luddites like Ted Kaczynski and Jack Ellul pointed out the fundamental issue with this kind of technological advancement, you know that it's gonna create a mess, but if you don't use it you will find yourself left behind.
      A global economy also means global markets and global supply/demand. If you're not using the biggest advancements in efficiency and cost-cutting, someone else will be, and you will be left in the dust.

      Whoever said that line you quoted is, I believe, sadly right.

    • Certainly humanoid robots have the potential to put a lot of Chinese workers out of work.

      There are two aspects to this. The first is economic, whether robots will displace the need for human workers. The second regards safety, whether robots can be made safe. And by safety, we acknowledge that robots working around humans can never be 100% safe but still need to achieve some number of 9's, especially concerning the highest severity outcomes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The question is "can humanoid robots be made cheaply enough, and low maintenance enough that they are cheaper than human workers"?
      The answer to that is going to be very task specific...at least for several years.

      So "putting the robots to work in the factory" isn't sufficient detail to decide what it means. They *could* just be "Test this out on some specific job, and see how it works". I doubt that they're "slip these robots in to replace whatever jobs you've got". The reasonable expectation is that they

  • I'd prefer if a small country invented a viable humanoid worker robot first and kept it to themselves, to demonstrate the dangers to the rest of the world with as little loss of human life as possible.

    If you can stick a gun in that robot's hands and have a robot security guard, the shit will hit the fan with extra force.

    • The "small countries" are typically being aggressively prevented from getting too advanced.

      Various schemes, from murders and kidnappings to "international law" that bans development, to tariffs to force the advanced bits to move to the "metropolis", to threats of occupation, to wars.

      So you're out of luck, it will happen in one of the two large fascist territories.

  • Just like it's not the year of the Linux Desktop, robotic AI has a long way to go. WSJ tomes like this are often done as a flag, hoisted to see who salutes.

    AI is often dumber than a box of rocks. Add it to robotics and it's a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not discounting a future with robotics in it, or increasing value.

    It's the drooling wet dream of capitalists to cut out labor. That's you and I. First, AI will replace all coders. Yeah, sure, go ahead with that and reap the rewards. It'll take 10x the co

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      It's the drooling wet dream of capitalists to cut out labor. That's you and I. First, AI will replace all coders. Yeah, sure, go ahead with that and reap the rewards. It'll take 10x the costs to unravel those bugs.

      Put into self-driving vehicles? Wasn't that supposed to happen a few years ago? How many deaths will it take until the lessons are learned. How much money will get burned on the attempts? How many will die in bad crashes in the meantime, boiled in burning lithium battery fires?

      I think there's a big differences between self-driving cars and using AI to replace programmers. There's no feasible way to have enough cab drivers and Uber drivers for everyone to stop driving themselves, nor will public transit ever get good enough to be a good alternative to a car outside of large cities. So self-driving car tech is doing way more than just replacing the small number of people who drive for a living. It is also giving mobility to the elderly, giving several hours per week of commute t

      • No. The same myriad inputs needed for safety in navigating an auto for a passenger is quite similar to the variety of skills needed to be a good coder.

        AI isn't going to replace either, it's a labor-replacement wet dream.

        Even Salesforce, who I once admired, is now embroiled in automation tricks that simply reveal the banal infrastructure behind the scenes that they remarket as textured fru fru customized infrastructure, the curtain pulled, the bald wizard of odd revealed.

        C'mon man, who are you fooling?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          No. The same myriad inputs needed for safety in navigating an auto for a passenger is quite similar to the variety of skills needed to be a good coder.

          No, not really. Being a good programmer is a creative process involving design aspects, low-level coding aspects, naming things (one of the two^H^H^Hthree hard problems in computer science), and generally figuring out how to express a vague general concept as a series of strict rules.

          Driving safely is just combining GPS routing (which is a long-solved problem) with obeying a bunch of fairly well-defined road rules and recognizing hazards and stopping or steering when you see one &mdash identification,

          • Re:It's not the year of robotic AI. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Sunday March 30, 2025 @09:41PM (#65270693)

            We have to disagree.

            The transient nature of navigating transportation obstacles requires knowing many concepts, and avoiding the ones that lead to bad outcomes. Driving automation and coding intersect at many junctures.

            Code is not static, and neither is driving. On a good day, easily summoned choices can be made, and on a bad day, dependencies require astute and rapid choices to be made productively.

            The timing of transportation doesn't wait; conclusions of many inputs have to render the right choice in an action. Deftly done, all is good, rider arrives at a destination, money earned, no harm no foul.

            A similar sequence of events occurs in programming. The only item ostensibly removed is a split-second life/death choice. You can dry-run an app just like you can dry-run empty in-training vehicles.

            That under highly confined circumstances, driving after millions of miles of training in limited geography, AI can drive some cars is just a toe-dip in the real world. Phoenix, SF LA-- they get little snow. They have minimal random objects invading spaces. The template you cite is highly-confined, somewhat to maximally arid circumstance and environment. The real world is but a fraction of that.

            Your new robot vacuum doesn't make any money, it just phones home and rats out your living quarters geometry for profits. Look it up. And you know how your Tesla knows your every move. There is no privacy in a Tesla. You're part of the product. You charge at Tesla chargers, use the screen for nav and looking up restaurants. You're part of the product. You're no longer autonomous as a driver, and not really in control. Hope that works for you.

            One day, I agree it will be different. That's not today, this week, month, year, or perhaps even decade.

            AI is trying to be "creative". Whether code, or machine-applications. It's not ready yet. It's being pushed to satisfy the fantasies of capitalists.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              The transient nature of navigating transportation obstacles requires knowing many concepts, and avoiding the ones that lead to bad outcomes. Driving automation and coding intersect at many junctures.

              Code is not static, and neither is driving. On a good day, easily summoned choices can be made, and on a bad day, dependencies require astute and rapid choices to be made productively.

              Making a choice at its simplest is an if statement. It's boolean logic. Making lots of rapid choices that take into account the data coming in can be measured objectively. Creative efforts can only be measured subjectively. That by itself makes the two fundamentally different in terms of designing training systems.

              The timing of transportation doesn't wait; conclusions of many inputs have to render the right choice in an action. Deftly done, all is good, rider arrives at a destination, money earned, no harm no foul.

              Let's be realistic here. On 99% of drives, nothing interesting happens. You just have to pick the correct lane, stop for stop signs and traffic lights, and obey the speed limit, and you get

              • I doubt that our mutual experience levels are going to allow us to agree on these points.

                Consider the architecture of an RTOS vs, say Linux (which has been re-architected in an RTOS release). Let's map the RTOS to a standard kernel for sake of this example.

                An RTOS is entirely reactive. Inputs control it at all times. This reactance is like the self-driving application that must make snap judgments of numerous conditions and rapid input changes to alter the path of what it's controlling. It needs excruciatin

  • Robots are everywhere in factories already. I suppose that humanoid ones might be more flexible in the tasks that they can carry out than the current ones that are basically single task, but they would also presumably share some of the limitations of humans. The AI part seems unnecessary. There are only a limited number of things that need doing in a factory and it would probably be simpler to simple train the robots do to them without an AI capability. All the AI would seem to add is ways of screwing t
    • The BYD mega-factory in China has robots galore. People forget China is a world leader in affordable industrial robots, and getting unassailable cost wise. Give it time, and they may get the chance to make a readable instruction manual. Pick and place robots are expert system, not AI. The most telling is to get a box with a barcode, but the product inside is wrong. Do they detect shipped weight? Probably not.

  • The intelligent thing to do would be for our government to declare this a priority and spend money to drive US technology dominance forward... but the current idiocracy running the show thinks all government spending (excepting spending on the military, of course) is bad. So, instead, we will do what we can to prevent the Chinese from getting their hands on US tech - which might work for a year or two but will eventually blow up in our faces as they develop their own tech and push past us (since the US doe

    • Those two goals don't necessarily oppose one another. Cutting government spending in the US has little to no relation to automation of factories in the US.

      Unless you're dingy enough to think that our government could actually subsidize expansion of robotic workers. That would be the best (and most expensive) way to prevent automation of labor.

      Meanwhile our current administration is even cutting positions at the Pentagon. Hmm!

      • Any major leap forward throughout history has very likely been done with the assistance of government funding - at least the first attempt. Ancient sea-going explorers were funded by kings and queens. The space race was funded by taxpayers. After it was proven feasible, then private financing took over to profit from the initial government gamble. It's in our country's best interests to promote science and technology, not only for the cutting edge jobs it provides, but for self-defense, and relevance in

        • If the Feds start handing out money for mass automation of factories, it'll get tied up for years just like CHIPS funding and funding for EV chargers. Billions allocated, nothing built. Stop equivocating our current government with "ancient sea going explorers funded by kings and queens". Or even the Feds from the 60s. Things have changed.

          And you may not like the cuts but there are cuts. Including in the military, which was the point I was making (to contradict the erroneous statement of the car guy).

  • The US is already struggling with security for embedded devices like printers, IOT, etc. Now think about these devices acting like Decepticons. If you were the Chinese government with the chance to force Order 66-like capabilities into devices that will be widespread among potential Western adversaries, what is the chance that you would actually not do this? If you have any doubts about whether China would force Order 66 into their robots, think about whether the CIA/NSA would pass up that opportunity.

    • If there's one thing you can be sure about, it's that the Chinese government are not the US government.
      Just because you or the CIA would, does NOT mean the Chinese will. Everyone is not you - THANK GOD FOR THAT. ...presuming you're from the USA, of course.

  • Is that China is looking to replace their factory workers with robots. For many many years they held back on doing that because their government didn't want the social unrest that was going to come from the mass layoffs.

    Now they just don't give a fuck. Xi has fully consolidated his power so he's just not worried about his people rising up and overthrowing him.

    So you're basically looking at 100 million people facing layoffs and their government is confident they can control that. And they are almost

    • Re:So one of the ways you know how fucked we are (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday March 30, 2025 @09:36PM (#65270687)

      China has a population growth problem and a labor cost problem. People aren't having enough kids to keep China running and Chinese labor is getting too expensive for their oversaturation economy.

      • Just change one word and the concept carries over:
        America has a population growth problem and a labor cost problem. People aren't having enough kids to keep America running and American labor is getting too expensive for their oversaturation economy.

        In America we kick out immigrants and move to have our children fill the labor void (until the Tesla Optimus robots can kindly enough replace the child labor).

        In Florida: "remove numerous existing protections for teenage workers, and allow them, in the Florida g

    • Bla bla China bad...bla bla.

      Have you considered that China might actually have a plan? Of course not, because...well, you and your kind must know better.

      Sheesh. Listen to yourselves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Factory jobs were only ever a stepping stone on the way to higher paying knowledge jobs. Xi never intended everyone to be a factory worker, and for China to remain a source of low cost labour.

      You vastly over-estimate the CCP's grip on power. Not only are there forces within the CCP that wouldn't stand for what you suggest, Xi included, but as we saw a few years ago with the COVID lockdowns, when enough people get fed up with their policies they are forced to change them.

  • Rofl. Your paranoia is pathetic. USA's national insecurity is so easy projected onto others.

    Really pathetic.

  • For now, I know it will be plagued with problems. High costs, lots of bugs, etc.

    But it's just matter of time it will work well.

    Then what?

    Then it depends in the next bottleneck. What limits our consumption?
    There are different possible bottlenecks. One is wealth distribution. It doesn't matter if there are lots of people if robots owners accumulates most of the wealth so consumption of the most is limited or reduced, so the total consumption doesn't increase. That's turn into a dystopia.

    Another is resources.

    • But, if robots replace humans on all (or even half) the available jobs... manufacturing, call centers, fast food, etc., then where does the money to buy the robot-produced items come from and what are us mere humans supposed to do? Just sit around all day getting fat (like the humans in Wall-E), sit around and order from "the catalog of cheaply-made-by-a-robot, priced outrageously" stuff? Sure, robots (the Allen-Bradley style ones) can be useful for certain jobs, but taking the human factor out of, say, ma

  • They only have 1.5 billion workers.

  • "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries." - Your head has to be a billion miles up America's ass to think America is going to win any race of this kind with China in the next 100 years. A billion miles.

  • So, why humanoid robots? Is that so they can be used in various positions, rather than, say, like the welding robots the US Big Three automakers use?

    Is this to solve the issue of an aging and shrinking population? Of course, if we used it in the US, that would mean that most of the folks on slashdot (or at least the trolls) would be offline, sitting around fire barrels, like in Max Headroom.

  • Robots need power semiconductors, not processors. Huawei Atlas and similar systems can run remotely to provide compute which drops power requirements to watts locally rather than kilowatts when battery power matters.

    As for software, ROS is open source as well as many others. China can fill in the rest.

    Precision components. Now we're making stuff up. I have bought miniscule high performance, high torque linear actuators from China. Tiny high performance toroidal geared closed loop motors are available everyw

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