China's Robot Revolution

Responding to an aging populace and rising wages, Beijing is pushing investment in automatons

- Dexter Roberts and Rachel Chang, with Thomas Black

Inside a lab at Beijing-based e-commerce giant JD.com Inc., a spider like robot plunges from its gray frame, seizes a book on a conveyor belt with its suctioning claws, and throws it into a crate. The machine, developed for use in automated warehouses, can sort 3,600 objects an hour—four times as many as a human can. Almost 1,200 miles away, in a break room at E-Deodar Robot Equipment Co.’s factory in south China’s Pearl River Delta manufacturing hub, a human-looking droid is deftly handling a more mundane task: serving workers coffee. Both are key to the mainland’s hopes to rule the market for service robots that can handle tasks such as delivering mail or making breakfast for a pensioner.

“They’re putting a lot of money and a lot of effort into automation and robotics,” says John Roemisch, vice president for regional operations at Fanuc America Corp., a unit of Japan’s Fanuc Corp., the world’s No. 1 robot maker. “There’s nothing keeping them from coming after our market.”

China is embracing robotics with the same fervor that made it a world leader in solar energy and high-speed rail—its more than 22,000 kilometers (13,670 miles) of installed track totals far more than any other nation’s. Beijing’s economic planners view it as a way to a broader strategic goal: dominating emerging markets for artificial intelligence, driverless vehicles, and digitally connected appliances and homes. “China has a great history of being an effective fast follower,” says Colin Angle, chief executive officer of U.S.-based vacuum and defense robot maker IRobot Corp. “The question will be, can they innovate?”