TAIPEI, Taiwan — The 2014 Electronic Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) Forum has just finished in Shenzhen, China. The company's General Manager at Automatic Committee Dai Jia-peng told Chinese media that Foxconn has completed the robot development and a robot family, which has been entitled with FOXBOT that only for the company's private usage, not for sale for the time being.
Foxconn CEO Terry Gou claimed that the company is going to use 1 million robots to replace the manpower of certain repetitive steps in assembly lines. However, this goal is far better than the real situation. Dai Jia-peng emphasized that Foxconn has viewed the industrial robot as one of the next big things.
Dai Jia-peng said, as soon as the company proposed the 1 million robots at that time, left the whole industry with shocked. But now, the demographic structure of Chinese population has been changed, as well as the manufacturing industry that resulted in many companies hard to find the right employees.
According to an earlier report, Dai Jia-peng said that so far there are 10 industrial parks contacted them in a bid to set up robots to replace manpower.
Dai Jia-peng suggested that developing robots is a great amount of investment, not only hardware and systems, but also education and training, maintenance. In this ecosystem, robots aren't omnipotent. For example, robots can't replace manpower in precision assembly of consumer electronics.
