Indeed, interest in robots is exploding around the world. In the capital market,

<The robot industry is spreading due to the fight for technological hegemony>

Indeed, interest in robots is exploding around the world. In the capital market, investment and interest in robot companies continue regardless of the issuance and distribution markets, and new robot companies are throwing their hat in the ring. Tech giant companies are busy praising robots as future growth engines.

The area of robots, which used to be only industrial robots, cooperative robots, and service robots equipped with AMR or simple functions, is rapidly expanding to humanoid robots with the highest difficulty. Several representative humanoid robots have appeared in the United States, China, and Europe.

Why is the robot industry suddenly receiving attention, and how will the robot industry unfold in the future?

First, after the release of the Transformer algorithm in 2017, the generative artificial intelligence technology has been advanced. This has enabled robots to be given advanced intelligence, enabled learning, and raised optimistic expectations for human-robot communication problems.

The algorithm of artificial intelligence, which was limited to language, has not only evolved into a vision transformer that can solve visual problems, but is now expanding to a motion transformer.

Nvidia has become a leader in robot learning by upgrading solutions for robots such as Jetson, Isaac, Metropolis, and Eureka every year. When you look at Figure 01, a humanoid robot of figures invested by OpenAI and Nvidia, you can see humans understand and respond to commands in language. Voice commands as the human robot of dreams have become possible in reality.

If hardware-oriented robot approaches have limited robots' abilities, there is no doubt that artificial intelligence will greatly expand the range of robots' abilities. With artificial intelligence, robots will think for themselves, receive commands from humans by voice, as well as Locomotion Planning, Motion Control, and perform tasks.

Second, it was true that R&D had been limited due to the small size of robot companies. No matter how much of the sales were poured into R&D, the scale was only billions to tens of billions of won. However, as global automakers became interested in electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and smart factories and made trillions of investments at the same time, the level of intersectional technology with robots began to rise significantly.

Battery technologies that robots need, small but high-efficiency, low-power motors, sensors and semiconductors necessary for cognition-judgment-control, and technologies that can understand the world with visual sensors and path planning by themselves are all pouring out from the autonomous driving technology ecosystem.

It is also a gift from the automobile industry that the unit price of core parts has fallen significantly due to mass production. This is why Tesla emphasized the technical similarity with Full Self Driving (FSD) when it unveiled Optimus, and it is in this context that Hyundai Motor boldly acquired Boston Dynamics.

The fully autonomous driving technology, which will one day be completed, will greatly contribute to the advancement of robots. Mass production of robots will also be helped by the automobile industry's system. The automobile industry and the robot industry have considerable technical similarities and are likely to live in symbiosis.

Third, the aspect of the U.S.-China conflict is spreading into a battle of technology hegemony. Recently, when a new robot technology emerges in the United States, robots that show similar movements or functions are appearing in China after a few days. China has reached a level that substantially threatens the United States beyond its fast follower in the field of robots.
Unitree Robotics, Ubitech, Fourier Intelligence, and Xiaomi are the representatives, but dozens of humanoid robots and hundreds of robot companies are located.

In the field of artificial intelligence, which is the biggest difficulty in robot development, China is the second-largest in the world, closely trailing the United States. In particular, robots equipped with fairly competitive Chinese AI on highly cost-effective Chinese hardware can be overwhelming. This has the potential to score higher in price competitiveness, commercialization, and penetration than robots that combine technologically perfect German and Japanese hardware with top-notch American AI.

As the competition between the U.S. and China intensifies, Korea, Europe, and Japan will become more anxious, and robot policies of each country will inevitably pour out. This competition with robots between countries will be linked to the Unmanned Weapon System (UWS) field in the near future. This means that the competitiveness of the robot industry will soon become a world that is directly connected to the national defense capability.

Fourth, autonomous driving and robots are representative embedded AI. It is not difficult for artificial intelligence to accurately control the laws of physics. It is difficult to control various variables such as gravity, inertia, friction, centrifugal force, distortion of light, scattering, and back light.

On-device AI and physical embedded AI, which are large tributaries of artificial intelligence, are surely expanding into huge industries. From this industrial point of view, investment in autonomous driving and robots is close to the nation's tech infrastructure. The areas of embedded AI to be derived will be endless. Robots will be in charge of not only factories and industrial sites, but also kitchens of restaurants, hospitals and nursing homes, and even bad things for each home. In Korea, where the proportion of the manufacturing industry is much higher than in other advanced countries, it is imperative to secure its own capabilities in the entire embedded AI area, that is, hardware, software, and artificial intelligence platforms.  

Watching the emergence of colorful humanoid robots abroad and their learning process will make all Koreans feel the same, but it is true that they are worried. Even for robots, there is a limit to hardware-oriented approaches. We need to start making bold investments in artificial intelligence right away. After securing a competitive data center, Roe