China Is Building a Robot Army of Model Workers - Millions of humans replaced...
Robotics
China Is Building a Robot Army of Model Workers
Can China reboot its manufacturing industry—and the
global economy—by replacing millions of workers with machines?
by Will Knight April 26, 2016
Above: A robot arm moves circuit boards around for
testing inside CIG’s factory in Shanghai. Previously the work was done by hand.
Inside a large, windowless room in an electronics factory
in south Shanghai, about 15 workers are eyeing a small robot arm with
frustration. Near the end of the production line where optical networking
equipment is being packed into boxes for shipping, the robot sits motionless.
“The system is down,” explains Nie Juan, a woman in her
early 20s who is responsible for quality control. Her team has been testing the
robot for the past week. The machine is meant to place stickers on the boxes
containing new routers, and it seemed to have mastered the task quite nicely.
But then it suddenly stopped working. “The robot does save labor,” Nie tells
me, her brow furrowed, “but it is difficult to maintain.”
The hitch reflects a much bigger technological challenge
facing China’s manufacturers today. Wages in Shanghai have more than doubled in
the past seven years, and the company that owns the factory, Cambridge
Industries Group, faces fierce competition from increasingly high-tech
operations in Germany, Japan, and the United States. To address both of these
problems, CIG wants to replace two-thirds of its 3,000 workers with machines
this year. Within a few more years, it wants the operation to be almost
entirely automated, creating a so-called “dark factory.” The idea is that with
so few people around, you could switch the lights off and leave the place to
the machines.
But as the idle robot arm on CIG’s packaging line
suggests, replacing humans with machines is not an easy task. Most industrial
robots have to be extensively programmed, and they will perform a job properly
only if everything is positioned just so. Much of the production work done in
Chinese factories requires dexterity, flexibility, and common sense. If a box
comes down the line at an odd angle, for instance, a worker has to adjust his
or her hand before affixing the label. A few hours later, the same worker might
be tasked with affixing a new label to a different kind of box. And the
following day he or she might be moved to another part of the line entirely.
Despite the huge challenges, countless manufacturers in
China are planning to transform their production processes using robotics and
automation at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, they don’t really have a
choice. Human labor in China is no longer as cheap as it once was, especially
compared with labor in rival manufacturing hubs growing quickly in Asia. In
Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, factory wages can be less than a third of
what they are in the urban centers of China. One solution, many manufacturers—and
government officials—believe, is to replace human workers with machines.
Gerald Wong, CEO of CIG, is developing an automated
electronics factory.
The results of this effort will be felt globally. Almost
a quarter of the world’s products are made in China today. If China can use
robots and other advanced technologies to retool types of production never
before automated, that might turn the country, now the world’s sweatshop, into
a hub of high-tech innovation. Less clear, however, is how that would affect
the millions of workers recruited to China’s booming factories.
There are still plenty of workers around now as I tour
CIG’s factory with the company’s CEO, Gerald Wong, a compact man who earned
degrees from MIT in the 1980s. We watch a team of people performing delicate
soldering on circuit boards, and another group clicking circuit boards into
plastic casings. Wong stops to demonstrate a task that is proving especially
hard to automate: attaching a flexible wire to a circuit board. “It’s always
curled differently,” he says with annoyance.
But there are some impressive examples of automation
creeping through Wong’s factory, too. As we walk by a row of machines that
stamp chips into circuit boards, a wheeled robot roughly the size of a
mini-fridge rolls by ferrying components in the other direction. Wong steps in
front of the machine to show me how it will detect him and stop. In another
part of the factory, we watch a robot arm grab finished circuit boards from a
conveyor belt and place them into a machine that automatically checks their
software. Wong explains that his company is testing a robot that does the
soldering work we saw earlier more quickly and reliably than a person.
After we finish the tour, he says, “It is very clear in
China: people will either go into automation or they will go out of the
manufacturing business.”
Automate or bust
China’s economic miracle is directly attributable to its
manufacturing industry. Approximately 100 million people are employed in
manufacturing in China (in the U.S., the number is around 12 million), and the
sector accounts for almost 36 percent of China’s gross domestic product. During
the last few decades, manufacturing empires were forged around the Yangtze
River Delta, Bohai Bay outside Beijing, and the Pearl River Delta in the south.
Millions of low-skilled migrant workers found employment in gigantic factories,
producing an unimaginable range of products, from socks to servers. China
accounted for just 3 percent of global manufacturing output in 1990. Today it
produces almost a quarter, including 80 percent of all air conditioners, 71
percent of all mobile phones, and 63 percent of the world’s shoes. For
consumers around the world, this manufacturing boom has meant many low-cost
products, from affordable iPhones to flat-screen televisions.
In recent years, though, China’s manufacturing engine has
started to stall. Wages have increased at a crippling 12 percent per year on
average since 2001. Chinese exports fell last year for the first time since the
financial crisis of 2009. And toward the end of 2015 the Caixin Purchasing
Managers’ Index, a widely used indicator of manufacturing activity, showed that
the sector had contracted for the 10th month in a row. Just as China’s
manufacturing boom fed the global economy, the prospect of its decline has
already started to spook the world’s financial markets.
Within a few years, CIG plans to have a largely automated
operation—what’s sometimes called a “dark factory.”
Automation appears to offer an enticing technological
solution. China already imports a huge number of industrial robots, but the
country lags far behind competitors in the ratio of robots to workers. In South
Korea, for instance, there are 478 robots per 10,000 workers; in Japan the
figure is 315; in Germany, 292; in the United States it is 164. In China that
number is only 36.
The Chinese government is keen to change this. On March
16, officials approved the latest Five Year Plan for China’s economy, which is
reported to include an initiative that will make billions of yuan available for
manufacturers to upgrade to technologies including advanced machinery and
robots. The government also plans to create dozens of innovation centers across
the country to showcase advanced manufacturing technologies. Some regional
authorities in China have been especially bold in their own efforts. Last year
the government of Guangdong, a province that contains many large manufacturing
operations, promised to spend $150 billion equipping factories with industrial robots
and creating two new centers dedicated to advanced automation.
The goal is to overtake Germany, Japan, and the United
States in terms of manufacturing sophistication by 2049, the 100th anniversary
of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. To make that happen, the
government needs Chinese manufacturers to adopt robots by the millions. It also
wants Chinese companies to start producing more of these robots.
Workers at CIG retrieve items from one of several mobile
robots that ferry materials around the facility.
The hope is that this will create a virtuous cycle,
helping to birth a new high-tech industry and inspiring innovations that could
spill over from manufacturing into other sectors and products.
Introducing hordes of robot workers is hardly something
that can be done overnight, however. That much is clear from the struggles
faced by Foxconn, a $130 billion Taiwanese manufacturer famous for employing
hundreds of thousands of workers in city-size factories—and for making, among
other products, Apple’s iPhones. In 2011, Foxconn’s founder and CEO, Terry Gou,
said he expected to have a million robots in his company’s plants by 2014.
Three years later, the effort had proved more challenging than expected, and
just a few tens of thousands of robots had been deployed.
The transition to robot workers may upend Chinese
society, since so many people work in manufacturing.
Despite the challenges, Day Chia-peng, general manager of
Foxconn’s automation technology development committee, says the company is
automating a growing number of tasks on its lines. These include the
manufacture of displays and printed circuit boards, although processes that
involve bending or snapping components into place still pose challenges. The
company is even exploring ways that products themselves can be redesigned to
make automated manufacturing easier. And it recently said it will sell some of
the robots it has developed in-house to other manufacturers.
The transition from human to robot workers may upend
Chinese society. Some displaced factory workers could find employment in the
service sector, but not all of the 100 million now employed in factories will
find such jobs a good match. So a sudden shift toward robots and automation
could cause economic hardship and social unrest. “You can make the argument
that robotic technology is the way to save manufacturing in China,” says
Yasheng Huang, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “But China also
has a huge labor force. What are you going to do with them?”
Dancing bots
A few days before visiting CIG, I went to China’s first
major robotics event, the World Robot Conference, held inside a vast exhibition
hall located within Beijing’s Olympic Park. The city was in the grip of an
unusually cold spell, and producing the electricity to meet its heating needs
had resulted in lung-searing air pollution from nearby coal power plants. But
the snow and smog had done nothing to deter hundreds of researchers and
companies, and thousands of attendees, from coming to the event.
A CIG worker inspects a custom-made machine for building
circuit boards.
First came a theatrical opening ceremony, during which a
huge video wall showed innovations from China’s ancient history spliced,
somewhat oddly, with clips of robots from science fiction movies. The guest
list included several high-ranking Chinese politicians. Li Yuanchao, China’s
vice president, read messages of congratulations from President Xi Jinping and
Premier Li Keqiang. The vice president said that investing in robotics research
would not only feed the country’s manufacturing industry but encourage greater
domestic innovation.
After watching several talks, I wandered past endless
demos set up by robot companies and research institutes. I watched as an
enormous industrial robot fitted with a fork-like appendage went through some
sort of routine factory work at terrifying speed. Other demos were more
whimsical, like a small industrial machine performing a mesmerizing rendition
of a traditional Chinese dragon dance (in full costume), and a mobile robot
equipped with two racquets playing badminton with excited attendees. A humanoid
robot with flashing eyes was carrying a small automated vacuum cleaner around
on a tray.
It was also possible to grasp just how ambitious China
will be in trying to replace human workers in its factories. HIT Robot Group, a
company affiliated with one of the country’s foremost technical universities,
Harbin Institute of Technology, had mocked up a battery production line that
itself seemed like one giant robot. Robotic vehicles ferried components between
various manufacturing machines. The only spots for humans were inside a control
room in the center and on a line where especially fiddly manual work needed to
be done. I later learned that HIT estimates the new factory could reduce human
labor by as much as 85 percent.
But it was also evident that as a country with a history
of seemingly endless cheap labor, China had to date been outpaced in the robot
revolution. Rethink Robotics, a Boston-based company, was showing off a pair
of flexible and intelligent industrial machines. Unlike conventional industrial
robots, these products, called Baxter and Sawyer, require very little
programming, and they are equipped with sensors that allow them to recognize
objects and avoid hitting people. They also cost between $20,000 and $30,000
instead of the hundreds of thousands typical of an industrial robot. Speaking
to me after the event, Rethink founder and robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks said
that China represents a huge potential market for his company, which recently
opened offices in Shanghai. Chinese robot makers are likely to start making
more flexible and intelligent robots, too. But for now their products lag
behind those of Western manufacturers.
“A game we often play when we go to a trade show in the
Far East is we go and see the industrial robots from little companies and say,
‘Oh, that’s a copy of that, and that’s a copy of that,’” Brooks said. It will,
he suggested, take time for China’s robotics companies to catch up.
Reinvented in China
To see for myself how far China’s researchers have to go,
I visited Shanghai Jiao Tong University, one of the country’s most prestigious
institutions and home to China’s oldest academic robotics lab, founded in 1979.
I found myself on a lush and sprawling campus in a quiet suburb in south
Shanghai, surrounded by students cycling around on squeaky bicycles. There, I
found a modern-looking building that housed the robotics lab.
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University are
developing humanoid and walking robots.
Zhu Xiangyang, a professor in his late 40s with thin
glasses and a fleece sweater-vest, welcomed me to his office with tea and an
irrepressible smile. The lab has a few dozen professors and research scientists
and more than 100 doctoral and master’s students, and Zhu is justifiably proud
of its research. In one room was a brain-controlled robotic wheelchair,
operated by means of an electroencephalogram cap worn by a graduate student. A
video showed a cyborg cockroach fitted with a wireless implant that connected
to its peripheral nervous system and made it possible to control the creature’s
movements from a computer. In another room, a researcher demonstrated snakelike
and soft-bodied robots capable of reaching or crawling through narrow spaces.
Inside a garage, a prototype self-driving car, not unlike one of Google’s, is
being developed in collaboration with a Chinese carmaker called Chery.
“More and more, we need to get into more advanced robots.
That can help make a dark factory.”
Despite the impressive research projects at places like
Jiao Tong, I kept wondering just how China will fulfill its manufacturing
ambitions. Kai Yu is the founder of a startup called Horizon Robotics and was
previously the head of an AI-focused research lab set up by Baidu, China’s
dominant Internet company. Within the Baidu lab, Yu and colleagues were focused
on a field of AI called deep learning, which involves training large simulated
neural networks to recognize patterns in data. Researchers are now starting to
explore how machine learning might make the next generation of industrial
robots even smarter and more flexible. “In the future, what I see is China
being more creative [in robotics],” Yu told me. “Original design, original
ideas, but also some of the fundamental technologies, like deep learning,
neural networks, artificial intelligence.”
Yu believes that the AI techniques developed by China’s
big Internet companies for search, e-commerce, and other purposes could be
applied to robots. “China has a very good opportunity to catch up,” he said.
“The skills they have learned in the last five years can be transferred to
making intelligent machines.”
When I later toured CIG’s factory, it wasn’t too hard to
imagine how such advances could start feeding into Wong’s efforts to automate
his operation. For one thing, a robot capable of learning and adapting
presumably wouldn’t be baffled by a misaligned box that needs labeling.
After the tour, Wong took me through a PowerPoint
presentation that laid out the company’s plan for the next few years, and then
the conversation turned to intelligent robotics. “We’re going to use standard
robots at first,” Wong said. “But then we’re going to use more advanced ones.
More and more, we need to get into more advanced robotics. That can help make a
dark factory.”
Given the economic imperative, the government’s
determination, and the country’s growing technological sophistication, it seems
very likely that manufacturing companies across China will automate
successfully and that the country will become a leader in the technologies of
advanced automation.
And yet it’s strange to think about the changes in store
for Chinese manufacturing workers. At one point during our tour we had passed a
group of about 20 people taking an afternoon break. Everyone was apparently
snoozing, heads rested on arms folded in front of them. That’s hardly something
a robot needs to do. But I couldn’t help wondering what will happen to these
workers once robots have taken their jobs. Wong says they will most likely
return to their hometowns and find employment there, on a farm or perhaps in a
shop or restaurant. That may be so, but for some it won’t be so simple.
A week after leaving China, I received an e-mail from
Wong with some more information about his plans, along with a
characteristically bold promise. “Stay in touch,” he wrote. “We will make the
dark factory happen.”
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