I really hate modern headline writing. I think "Western executives confirm China's massive investment in advanced robotics" would have done everyone a better job.
The torygraph should be ashamed of itself.
The torygraph should be ashamed of itself.
I've been around the Mazda plant in Hiroshima, and the man-machine work pattern there was interesting. Taking static site robotics and making it mobile is a pretty natural progression. Maybe has more complexities but also has less embedded capital in the ground, to construct the flow process around the static robot. So as a step along the path for automation, bizarre though I think it is, having autonomous robots might be short-term to a path of re-working the process to suit static, less expensive robots.
It's even worse than that. The article shows that the west, on a per capita basis, has nearly 300% the robots that china does. Germany by itself has 449 robots per 10k compared to china's 567 per 10k.
It's not the west that has to catch up to china, it's china that has to catch up to the west when it comes to automation. Like every china related article, the truth is actually the opposite of what "news" companies write.
I think you misunderstand the metrics. The listed numbers are already per capita, adding them together does not increase the per capita number for the aggregate.