Akihabara News (Tokyo) – Despite the announcement from SoftBank Robotics that the iconic Pepper is heading for retirement, Japan’s robotics market as a whole is witnessing a major boom.
A multitude of factors have come together to boost demand for the robotics industry.
One of these factors is the aging population and the related issue of a shrinking workforce in Japan. Robots have been promoted in some quarters as a partial solution to the nation’s demographic crisis, though the results have so far fallen well short of the vision.
More recently, the Covid pandemic has helped push forward any kind of service that doesn’t require human contact, and robots have an obvious role to play in this respect as well. The need for robotics may be especially keen for logistics, warehousing, and medical firms.
Such demands have also encouraged companies to invest in advanced technologies such as image processing and Artificial Intelligence to attain better remote control services for robots.
According to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the robot industry in Japan could be valued at as much as ¥10 trillion (US$90 billion) by 2035.
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