Nowadays, Industry 4.0 is becoming a new idea of ​​manufacturing transformation. The concept of "Industry 4.0" was first proposed by the German government to build a new generation of manufacturing plants. Under this idea, the future manufacturing factory has two core competitiveness: the factory is no longer a human factory, but a factory that produces machines; it has the tools to monitor and track the massive data inside and outside the factory, and then summarize and analyze it.

Industrial robots have become an important path to realize the first step of Industry 4.0. The so-called industrial robot is a multi-joint manipulator or multi-degree-of-freedom robot oriented to the industrial field. It can automatically perform work as a machine device, relying on its own power and control capabilities to achieve various functions. These robots can be commanded by humans, or they can run according to pre-arranged programs, that is, they can be commanded by machines.

In China's manufacturing industry, there are only 30 robots per 10,000 workers. In comparison, based on 10,000 workers, South Korea has 437 robots, Japan has 323 robots, Germany has 282 robots, and the United States has 152 robots.

The advantages of using industrial robots are particularly obvious. First of all, in the context of rising labor costs, companies using industrial robots to replace workers can improve production efficiency and significantly reduce operating costs. Moreover, in certain types of work requiring high precision, such as stamping, heat treatment, welding, painting, plastic product forming, and machining, the performance of the machine is more stable and the error rate is lower. In addition, the machine can also be completely replaceable.

But the cost of industrial robots is also worthy of attention. From the current point of view, my country's domestic robot industry is still relatively backward, and can only cooperate with enterprises to carry out some simple tasks. In the entire robot industry chain, my country has no support from the upstream core component manufacturers in the industry chain, and key components still need to be imported from abroad, which is subject to long-term constraints. The price of imported robots is not cheap.

Second, after a company has spent a lot of money on buying many robots, the more difficult test is who controls these robots. No matter how intelligent the robot is, in the short term, industrial robots still need professional talents to program and operate, and the efficient operation of the machine is still inseparable from the cooperation of people. The lack of professional talents will also restrict the adoption of robots by manufacturing companies to a certain extent.

In the past few years, some electronic equipment foundries have successively started attempts to "robot" workers, but it was followed by the news of a large number of expansion of ordinary production workers. This also shows from a certain aspect that the advancement of the industrial robot plan is not so. smoothly.

Nevertheless, industrial robots are still an important manifestation of the Industry 4.0 era. From a global perspective, the industrial robot industry is ushering in new development opportunities, especially in the Chinese market. According to the latest report of the International Federation of Robotics, it is estimated that by 2017, my country's robot manufacturing scale will become the world's largest. This series of good news will not only promote the development of the robot industry, but also benefit China's manufacturing industry.