Inside China’s Plans for World Robot Domination
- Some 800 robot makers seek scale as Chinese industry automates
- JD.com, E-Deodar and Midea lead China’s charge for domination
China's Big Plans for the Robot Industry
Scenes from China’s quest to dominate the robotic future: At startup E-Deodar, a human-looking droid serves coffee to employees who are building $15,000 industrial bots that are about a third cheaper than foreign brands and are being used to automate assembly lines across the Pearl River Delta manufacturing hub.
Some 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the north, inside a lab at Beijing-based e-commerce giant JD.com Inc., a spider-like robot plunges down from its frame, seizes a book on a conveyor belt with its suctioned claws and hurls it into a crate. The machine can sort 3,600 objects an hour, four times as many as a person -- just one piece of the robotic technology the company’s developing to automate warehouses.