OFweekRobot“We already have the world’s largest robotics research team. But we still have pain points in robotics talent training and education,” said Professor Zhu Shiqiang, deputy secretary of the Party Committee of Zhejiang University and president of the Zhejiang Robot Association.
From May 16th to 17th, under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, and sponsored by the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province, the 4th China Robot Summit and Intelligent Economic Talents with the theme of “Intelligence + Era, Wisdom in the Future” The summit was held in Yuyao City, Zhejiang Province. More than 1,500 Chinese and foreign industry elites discussed artificial intelligence, the latest cutting-edge Robot technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and robot talent training.
Speaking of robots, people will think of artificial intelligence, drone photography, driverless cars, and educational robots, sweeping robots, and intelligent escort robots that go into homes. “Some people call 2016 the ‘first year of intelligence’,” said Liu Jinchang, a researcher at the High-Tech Research and Development Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology and chairman of the China Robot Summit Presidium. Since then, we will enter the “smart +” era.
Different from the fiery public opinion, industry experts have more calm thinking about the development of the robot industry. From the perspective of enterprises, “there is a shortage of talents now, and the cost of using one person is getting higher and higher. This is the pain of enterprises.” Professor Zhu Shiqiang said.
So, how big is the number of people engaged in robotics research in my country?
Professor Zhu Shiqiang once made simple statistics: search on authoritative websites for the thesis of our master’s and doctoral students, and enter two key conditions: one condition is that the title of the thesis contains the word “robot”, and the other One condition is that there are three words “robot” in the “keywords” of the paper. As a result, from 2001 to 2015, there were 2,352 doctoral dissertations and 18,580 master’s dissertations that met these two conditions.
A reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Online checked the “2016 Annual Recording and Approval Results of Undergraduate Majors in Ordinary Colleges and Universities” published by the Ministry of Education and found that more than 20 colleges and universities have added “Robotics Engineering” majors.
Talents engaged in robotics-related research are emerging continuously. Correspondingly, many companies still call “lack of people”, especially high-end talents.
“This is a pain point in robotics education.” Professor Zhu Shiqiang said that the robotics major is only a training direction in many schools.
Professor Zhu Shiqiang also made an analysis of the core teacher teams of robotics-related majors in my country’s colleges and universities.At present, the top experts engaged in teaching and research in the field of robotics in colleges and universities are between the ages of 45 and 55. Many people come frommechanicalWhen they were in college, “the mechanical discipline and the mechanical industry were relatively depressed, and the knowledge structure of the entire mechanical discipline was relatively old.” And now a large number of young scholars with new knowledge and new ideas are still in the “climbing” stage, “I also counted the number of papers published by Chinese experts at IROS (International Robot Conference, the world’s top robotics conference). , there were only 16 in 2014, 42 in 2015, and 46 in 2016, the proportion is still very low.” Professor Zhu Shiqiang said.
In addition, the reasons for this phenomenon are also related to the status quo of the development of my country’s robot industry.
Some people say that my country’s robot industry is developing rapidly, and it is growing at an average rate of two a day. “China claims to have thousands of robot companies now.”Shenyang Xinsong RobotautomationQu Daokui, president of the Co., Ltd., said that in fact, many parts and integrated applications are used in the industrial chain of robots.
His point of view has also been confirmed by Zhu Shiqiang.
“At present, there are many and few phenomena in the field of robotics industry.” Zhu Shiqiang said, “There are many conceptual prototypes in the news publicity, and few practical products are actually put into the market; there are many capital operations with robots as the theme, but robots are the core business. The performance is small; there are many companies and entrepreneurial teams that have recently poured into the field of robotics, but very few really have the core technology.”
Fortunately, there have been signs of improvement in the past two years, and the turning point probably appeared around 2010.
Professor Zhu Shiqiang introduced that he counted the trends of more than 50 master and doctoral students he has cultivated for more than 20 years after graduation. Among them, 24% went to government agencies, including enterprises and institutions; 24% stayed in colleges and universities; 37% went to enterprises, and not all of those who entered the enterprise entered the robot enterprise, and about 15% actually entered the robot enterprise. Although Professor Zhu Shiqiang “just dissects his own team”, it also reflects from one side that some high-end personnel who really carry out robot research do not “use what they have learned”. This situation has improved since 2010. As “robots” become more and more popular in the society, “more and more postgraduates studying in robotics-related fields stay in the robotics industry.” Zhu Shiqiang said, “Now more than 40% of postgraduates have returned to our own fields. .”
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