Elon Li’s curbside workshop in Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China, has 11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment. He is preparing to pay $US40,000 ($63,000) to a Chinese company for a robotic arm with a camera. The device uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention.
Only four years ago, the same system was available only from foreign robot companies and cost nearly $US140,000. “Before, I never would have imagined investing in automation,” Li said, adding that a human employee “can only work for eight hours a day, but a machine can work 24 hours.”
A robot sorts lug nuts before attaching wheels to electric cars at a Zeekr plant in Ningbo, China. Credit: Qilai Shen/The New York Times
Bigger companies bet far more on automation.
In Ningbo, a huge factory for Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, had 500 robots when it opened four years ago. Now there are 820, and many more are planned.
Cheerfully trilling Kenny G tunes to warn any people of their approach, robot carts haul aluminum ingots to an automated elevator, which lifts the blocks of metal to a furnace at the top of a 12-metre tall Chinese-made machine. Once molten, the aluminum is cast into the shapes of various car body panels and other components. More robot carts, and the occasional human driving a forklift, take the components to a warehouse.
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Yet more robots take the panels to the assembly line, where hundreds of robotic arms, working in teams of up to 16, do a complex dance to weld them together into car bodies. The welding area is a so-called dark factory, meaning that the robots can operate without workers and with the lights off.
China’s factories still employ legions of workers. Even with the automation, they are needed to check quality and install some parts that require manual dexterity, such as wiring harnesses. There are things cameras and computers cannot do on their own. Before cars are painted, workers still run gloved hands over them and sand smooth any tiny imperfections.
A worker making ovens and cookware at a small factory in Guangzhou. The company plans to acquire a robotic arm that uses artificial intelligence to replicate the way a person welds the sides of an oven. Credit: Qilai Shen/The New York Times
Yet, some of the later steps of quality control are also being automated with the help of artificial intelligence.
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Near the end of Zeekr’s assembly line, a dozen high-resolution cameras take photos of each car. Computers compare the images to an extensive database of correctly assembled cars and alert factory staff if a discrepancy is found. The task takes seconds.
“Most of our colleagues’ jobs involve sitting in front of a computer monitor,” said Pinky Wu, a Zeekr worker.
Zeekr and other Chinese automakers are also using artificial intelligence to design cars and their features more efficiently.
Carrie Li, a designer who works at Zeekr’s new office building in Shanghai, uses AI to analyse how different interior surfaces will intersect in a car.
“I have more spare time to open my mind and explore for myself which kinds of fashion trends to include in the cars’ interior,” Li said.
Car factories in the United States also use automation, but much of the equipment comes from China. Most of the world’s car assembly plants built in the past 20 years were in China, and an automation industry grew up around them.
Chinese companies also bought overseas suppliers of advanced robotics, such as Kuka of Germany, and moved much of their operations to China. When Volkswagen opened an electric car factory a year ago in Hefei, it had one robot from Germany and 1074 robots made in Shanghai.
China’s rapid advance in factory robotics has been propelled from the top down. Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” initiative, which began a decade ago, set out 10 industries in which China sought to be globally competitive. Robotics was one of them.
A white-glove inspection of a vehicle on the assembly line. There remain some tasks that computers and cameras can’t do on their own. Credit: Qilai Shen/The New York Times
To force the car industry to think about how to use humanoid robots with two arms and two legs, for example, government officials in Beijing told major automakers last year to rent robots and submit videos of them performing tasks in their assembly plants.
The Zeekr plant’s greeter robot, which is still in testing, has a humanoid hand.Credit: Qilai Shen/The New York Times
The videos required many takes to get them right. The robots did only basic tasks, such as sorting auto parts in a warehouse. But the initiative has helped push the carmakers along.
In a show of the automation push, the Beijing municipal government held a half-marathon on Saturday for 12,000 runners and 20 humanoid robots. Only six robots finished the race, and the fastest of them took nearly three times as long as the fastest runners. But the event helped draw attention to robots.
Last month, Premier Li Qiang, China’s second-highest official, said in his annual report to the legislature that the country’s plans this year would include an effort to “vigorously develop” intelligent robots. The country’s top economic planning agency announced a $US137 billion national venture capital fund for robotics, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies.
A display screen on a robot being trained to greet visitors at the Zeekr car assembly plant in Ningbo, China .Credit: Qilai Shen/The New York Times
China’s government-controlled banks have increased lending to industrial borrowers over the past four years by a staggering $US1.9 trillion. That has paid for the construction of factories as well as the replacement of equipment at existing ones.
China’s universities produce about 350,000 mechanical engineering graduates per year, as well as electricians, welders and other trained technicians.
By comparison, American universities graduate about 45,000 mechanical engineers each year.
Jonathan Hurst, chief robot officer and a co-founder of Agility Robotics, a leading American robot manufacturer, said finding skilled employees had been one of his biggest challenges. As a graduate student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hurst said, he was one of two mechanical engineers.
China’s rapid embrace of automation worries some Chinese workers.
Geng Yuanjie, 27, drives a forklift at the Zeekr factory, where he has worked for the past two years. He said there were considerably fewer robots at the Volkswagen factory where he previously worked. Surrounded by robots, he has few co-workers to talk to during his 12-hour shifts.
To demonstrate advances in automation, Beijing held a half-marathon for 12,000 runners and 20 humanoid robots. Only six robots finished. Credit: Andrea Verdelli/The New York Times
“I can feel the trend towards automation,” Geng said as he watched a robot cart pull a rack of car parts past his forklift. He said that his high school education might not be enough for him to qualify for classes in programming robots, and that he worried he might lose his job someday to a robot.
“It is not just my concern – everyone worries about it,” Geng said.
Automation has threatened and even eliminated jobs around the world for more than a century, often slowing automation’s growth. In China, there are fewer obstacles than practically anywhere else. China has no independent labor unions, and Communist Party control leaves almost no room for dissent.
Another factor behind China’s automation drive is the country’s demographic crisis.
The number of babies born each year has dropped by almost two-thirds since 1987. At the same time, two-thirds of people turning 18 now enroll at a university or college, an educational trajectory that has allowed a new generation to aspire to careers outside factory labor.
“China’s demographic dividend is over,” said Stephen Dyer, head of the Asia industrial practice at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. “They’re now in a demographic deficit, and the only way out of that is productivity.”
