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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board argued that Chinese companies stole the spotlight at a recent robotics expo. In industrial robotics, Japanese manufacturers like Fanuc are still frequently name-checked — but posters pointed out that Chinese firms are now offering to automate entire production lines, even whole factories, as a single package. Some noted that Japanese-made parts are still used in the joints of humanoid robots, complicating any simple verdict on who’s ahead. Others countered that most humanoid robot demos are remote-operated with limited real autonomy, while still others argued China wins on the balance of price and performance — leaving the thread split.
What people said
It's a real-world usability problem — the quality and precision aren't even in the same league.
Same with those restaurant serving robots: once they break down, there's no support, so they just end up parked as decorations in a corner or by the entrance.
What features would a robot need before it counts as "basically Doraemon"?
Even in industrial robots,
China's already overtaken us.
Japan makes robots that are bolted to a line.
China… sells the entire factory, turned into a robot, as the product itself.
It's a completely different scale.
Thing is, industrial robots
aren't built as general-purpose systems —
they're custom-built for one process at a time.
So if you turn the whole thing into a robot, what can that factory actually produce?
It starts with the factory owner's request — "I want this factory to produce that."
China designs it,
then ships a fully automated line — basically the whole factory — built exactly to the customer's order.
Since the genre shifted to card-game anime, in 10-20 years China will be the world's strongest in robot anime too.
Re: #30
We're already at the point where robots build robots — China's even got fully automated, start-to-finish factories… though if you only care about short-term revenue, using human labor can still work out cheaper.
Given a choice between a perfect, 100-point robot that's expensive
and an 80-point robot that's cheap,
the cheap one wins every time.
That's exactly how Japan lost the appliance market.
Exactly that…
For example,
if a Japanese smartphone with no AI costs ¥150,000
while a Chinese smartphone with AI costs ¥50,000,
most people are going to buy the latter.
The same dynamic is brutal news for manufacturers still selling old-style hardware — cars included.
The most fatal part is that if you're only starting physical-AI research now, you have to begin from square one on how to even collect data — meanwhile the US, China, and others have already built data collection into a huge range of products, and they're using that data to train and evolve physical AI before selling it.
China's the one that's a 100 out of 100 AND cheap.
Coming from the guy whose "China's economy is collapsing" line has been the same copypasta for a quarter century now — like the annual over-hyped praise for Beaujolais Nouveau (a wine released yearly with formulaic "best vintage ever" reviews).
Also, that property bubble was popped on purpose, since it had sent housing prices through the roof — and doing so actually stabilized rents and everything else.
Disguises itself as an ordinary person, and once it's inside a secured perimeter, suddenly sprints straight at the target — a suicide-bomber robot.
Feels like it's about time robot-soldier-vs-robot-soldier warfare actually starts happening.
Wouldn't drones do the job just as well?
Narrow specialization is a weak player's strategy.
Every knee joint on the humanoid robots China enters into competitions is Japanese-made, though.
No money in it unless you own the integrated technology.
Same goes for the software — most of the flashy demos are secretly being puppeted by a human behind the scenes.
It's not like they're autonomously judging situations and pulling off anything complex.
They can run, and perform pre-set reactions. That's about it.
Meanwhile Japanese university students apparently can't do anything.
That's not true at all.
In the electrical, mechanical, and information engineering labs at Japan's solidly-ranked universities, AI image recognition and haptics/tactile feedback are the hottest research topics right now — Japan's technical level is as high as ever.
Japan still isn't putting much focus into humanoid form, since there's not much practical point to it yet.
A "humanoid" robot is really just a mobility module (it doesn't have to be two legs)
with two robot arms bolted on (they don't have to be two arms either) — so there's basically zero corporate demand or practical use for it.
Right now there's still more demand for pet robots.
and heads back to its charger once the battery's low?
Is there a drone like that — basically a pet —
that doesn't do anything in particular, just wanders around the room?
That's basically Aibo or LOVOT already (Sony's robot dog and Groove X's companion robot, respectively).
If you mean one that cleans,
…huh, come to think of it, whatever happened to iRobot?
Avatar robots like that really matter for hospitals out in the middle of nowhere that don't have a decent surgeon on staff.
Background and key points of this discussion
Industrial robotics has long been a field where Japanese manufacturers like Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric hold a leading share of the global market, and that strength hasn’t changed. What’s drawing attention at recent expos, though, is the rise of Chinese manufacturers building humanoid robots and offering fully automated production-line packages — echoing the same “catch up on price and performance” pattern seen earlier with smartphones and EVs. The thread’s complaint that “most of the demos are remote-operated” is a criticism that’s dogged the humanoid robot industry more broadly for a while now — how autonomous something looks and how finished it actually is don’t always line up. It’s also true that Japanese manufacturers are still widely used for core components like joints, meaning the real divide between “those who assemble and sell” and “those who make the precision parts” runs deeper than what any single expo’s buzz suggests.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Japan = robots? Turns out that’s a myth — Chinese manufacturers dominate the expo 🤖”.
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