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Robotic Investment

Fledgling robot industry aims to fly high

From the article:

The Korean government has set its sights on robotics as a next-generation technology that it will attempt to nurture into a new engine for the country's economic growth. Last month, the Korean government designated the intelligent robot industry as one of the 10 high-technology industries that it hopes will become major economic growth drivers.

Under the project, the government plans to invest a total of 260 billion won ($226 million) by 2007 in fostering the country's fledgling robotics industry to help it grab a 10 percent share of the global intelligent-robot market by 2012.

In particular, the Commerce Ministry announced that it would spend 110 billion won in projects for five years from 2004 to develop 10 types of intelligent robots for household purposes, medical assistance and extreme work conditions.

This article discusses similar investments in Japan, which is gearing up to invest as much as $500 million per year in a long-range national intelligent robot research project:

That is one goal of the Japanese government's five billion yen ($37.7 million) Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP), which aims to market within a few years robots that can operate power shovels, assist construction workers and care for the elderly.

In the process, a new multi-billion-dollar Japanese industry could be born.

"Just as automobiles were the biggest product of the 20th century, people might eventually look back and say that robots were the big product of the 21st century," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, a researcher for the government-affiliated National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology... It predicts the expansion will be led by robots that perform everyday tasks and believes that, while there are no such robots on the market now, they could be ringing up annual sales of 1.5 trillion yen by 2010.

In a 2010 time frame, we can expect to see robots start to begin moving into the workplace in a significant way. It is likely that these robots will come from Japan and Korea rather than the United States. See Robotic Nation for details.