Neurosurgeon Tetsuya Goto had just begun testing a robot to perform brain surgery when he discovered Japan was moving to tighten regulations that would shut down his seven-year project.
Over the next dozen years, he watched in frustration as the Da Vinci, a rival endoscopic robot that US regulators had already approved, became a commercial success, while his and other Japanese prototypes languished in laboratories.
Japan, with the world’s largest number of robots, is now awakening to a crisis as its lead in robotics — one of its last areas of technological prominence — comes under threat from better-coordinated efforts in the US and Germany, as well as Asian rivals South Korea and China.
Photo: Reuters
As robots advance from the factory floor into homes, hospitals, shops and even war zones, officials hope to spur a new “robotics revolution” by rewriting rules that researchers say have stifled innovation.
“We think robotics can make Japan competitive again,” said Atsushi Mano, director of robotic technology at the Japanese Ministry of Trade’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.
The organization has recruited Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Panasonic Corp to make a rival to the Da Vinci that could perform more intricate tasks, such as removing pancreatic tumors while a surgeon manipulates its controls.
At stake is a fast-growing industry — the market for industrial robotic systems is worth US$29 billion a year worldwide according to the International Federation of Robotics.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in June, when he unveiled a framework for sweeping regulatory reforms, that he expected Japan’s robot market alone to triple to ¥2.4 trillion (US$21 billion) by 2020.
Healthcare robotics is tiny now, but has vast potential — such services are expected to overtake industrial uses within 10 years in the Japanese robot market.
The new surgical robot, part of a ¥5 billion medical robotics program that aims to have products in clinical trials by 2019, should have an easier time than Goto faced with regulators.
“If you asked the authorities, they wouldn’t say they kept medical devices from reaching the market, but as far as academics and companies are concerned they stopped Japanese research cold,” said Goto, a professor at Shinshu University in central Japan.
Abe, who has called a snap election for next month to seek a renewed mandate for his Abenomics economic policies, has promised deregulation and structural reform to foster industrial growth as a two-year stimulus drive falters.
A key trigger to action was Google Inc’s surprise acquisition a year ago of Schaft, a venture led by two former Tokyo University professors who developed a humanoid robot that handily won a rescue competition run by a research unit of the US Department of Defense. The robot had to drive a utility vehicle and climb a ladder to prevail against more than a dozen rivals.
“Everyone associates bipedal robots with Japan, so it was a shock that even that was being pulled away,” Waseda University professor Masakatsu Fujie said.
The US robotics industry has been powered in large part by the military, which provides funding and field testing for drones and disaster-relief robots, while Silicon Valley has nurtured innovations in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems such as Google’s self-driving car.
“To be honest, the US is a concern,” said Osamu Sudo, who helped to craft Japan’s robotics strategy as director of the industrial machinery division at the trade ministry, where he served until early July.
Other countries are also pushing robotics to the forefront of industrial policy: China, where sales grew 32-fold over the past decade to eclipse Japan as the biggest robot market last year, aims to make one-third of its own robots by next year.
South Korea has a five-year plan to spend US$500 million a year on its robotics industry, while the EU has earmarked 100 million euros (US$125 million) a year to its Horizon 2020 program that aims to pull in a further 2 billion euros annually in private funding.
Japan is trying to keep up: Ministries have requested ¥16 billion for direct investment in robotics in the next fiscal year.
Success will depend largely on reforming a fragmented regulatory process that can set insurmountable hurdles by mandating absolute safety, said Atsuo Takanishi, a professor at Waseda University who specializes in robotics.
The trade ministry has convinced Japanese Ministry of Health officials to relax certification procedures for medical devices and introduce affordable robots to nursing homes on a trial basis.
It also pushed for an international safety standard for care robots that Panasonic Corp passed in February with a robotic nursing bed that folds up into a wheelchair, eliminating the need for caregivers to lift their patients.
With the freeing of regulations, Kiyoshi Sawaki, who recently replaced Sudo as head of the trade ministry’s industrial machinery division, is confident that the government has created sufficient opportunities to succeed in robotics.
“The approval process is being simplified,” Sawaki said. “So companies can’t use the same excuses that they did before.”
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to