Robohub.org
 

Japan’s new robotics push: Funding and deregulation

by
25 November 2014



share this:

nextage In June, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said he wanted to treble the market for robots in Japan to $22 billion by 2020. Last month, the government launched a “robot revolution realization council” to craft a five-year blueprint to beef up the industry.

Japan has the world’s largest population of at-work robots. But that prominence is threatened from recent coordinated efforts in the US, Germany, South Korea and China. Thus the emphasis by Prime Minister Abe to “make robots a key pillar of our growth strategy… to make Japan competitive again.”

Deregulation and strategic funding are at the heart of Japan’s and Abe’s 5-year growth plan and their New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).

In one example described on CNBC, the team testing a brain surgery robot, had to shut down because of over regulation. They watched as the da Vinci surgical system became a commercial success while their and other Japanese prototypes languished in laboratories.

But now the new NEDO has recruited Kawasaki and Panasonic to make a rival to the da Vinci that could perform more intricate tasks including brain surgery. The new surgical robot thrust is a $42 million part of the overall $138 million framework. Part of that framework is regulatory reforms so that new robotic surgical devices will have an easier time with regulators and meet their goal of having rival products in clinical trials by 2019.

The Japanese government estimates the market for care service robots will reach $3.7 billion by 2035 from just $155 million today, and is encouraging products from Japanese companies to service those needs. They have also issued the world’s first safety standard for personal care robots to aid large corporations in their pursuit of the care marketplace. Panasonic, Yaskawa, Toyota, Cyberdyne and other Japanese companies have all announced care product plans over the next few years.

  • Panasonic has begun selling a robotic bed that converts into a wheelchair and will also begin to sell a robot to assist the elderly with walking;
  • Yaskawa will start selling a device to transport a bed-ridden person from the bed to a wheelchair and a robotic device for leg rehabilitation;
  • Toyota will start leasing rehab robots for mobility-disabled patients;
  • Cyberdyne’s HAL exoskeleton suit received approval from the new safety board earlier this year.

Other countries are also pushing robotics to the forefront of industrial policy: China, where sales grew 32-fold over the last decade to eclipse Japan as the biggest robot market in 2013, aims to make one-third of its own robots by 2015.

South Korea has a five-year plan to spend $500 million a year on its robotics industry, while the European Union has earmarked $125 million a year to its Horizon 2020 program that aims to pull in a further 2 billion euros in private funding.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.



tags: , , , ,


Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.
Frank Tobe is the owner and publisher of The Robot Report, and is also a panel member for Robohub's Robotics by Invitation series.





Related posts :



Interview with Dautzenberg Roman: #IROS2023 Best Paper Award on Mobile Manipulation sponsored by OMRON Sinic X Corp.

The award-winning author describe their work on an aerial robot which can exert large forces onto walls.
19 November 2023, by

Robot Talk Episode 62 – Jorvon Moss

In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Jorvon (Odd-Jayy) Moss from Digikey about making robots at home, and robot design and aesthetics.
17 November 2023, by

California is the robotics capital of the world

In California, robotics technology is a small fish in a much bigger technology pond, and that tends to conceal how important Californian companies are to the robotics revolution.
12 November 2023, by

Robot Talk Episode 61 – Masoumeh Mansouri

In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Masoumeh (Iran) Mansouri from the University of Birmingham about culturally sensitive robots and planning in complex environments.
10 November 2023, by

The 5 levels of Sustainable Robotics

Robots can solve the UN SDGs and not just via the application area.
08 November 2023, by

Using language to give robots a better grasp of an open-ended world

By blending 2D images with foundation models to build 3D feature fields, a new MIT method helps robots understand and manipulate nearby objects with open-ended language prompts.
06 November 2023, by





©2021 - ROBOTS Association


 












©2021 - ROBOTS Association