Humanoid robots entertain visitors at an artificial intelligence exhibition in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, on November 30, 2015 (XINHUA )

Thirty-year old Yu Zhichen, founder and CEO of Beijing Guangnian Wuxian Technology Co. Ltd., named his company's products after Alan Mathison Turing, the father of modern computer science and artificial intelligence (AI).

Established in 2010, Yu's company officially launched their Turing robots in 2014. According to the company, the robots are the most intelligent ones in the Chinese language environment. The company also delivers technical services; over the past year, it has answered more than 130 billion requests for services related to robots, smart homes and intelligent vehicle software as well as hardware.

Yu launched Turing OS (operating system) for second-generation Turing robots on November 16, 2015. The upgraded robots can be used in a wider range of scenarios offering education, financial and medical services, as well as services to seniors and children in ordinary households.

When Bill Gates founded Microsoft 40 years ago, he wished to put a computer on everyone's desk, Yu said. "Our dream is that every family will have robots," Yu proudly told Beijing Review .

Robotics has received significant attention in China in recent years, since the development of AI was elevated to become a component of the national strategy. In May 2015, the State Council released Made in China 2025, a plan to boost smart manufacturing. Two months later, the council unveiled the guiding opinions on actively promoting Internet Plus, which listed AI as one of the priority areas for investment.

Robots for homes

The Turing robots, with Chinese semantic recognition accuracy of about 90 percent, are designed to interact with humans and provide domestic services. Yu said that Turing robots have the comprehension ability like that of a 7- to 8-year-old child. Although the robots look naïve to adults, they are very smart in the eyes of children. Yu believes robots can be companions for children and learn with them since children's worlds are less complex, which makes it easier for robots to interact with them.

Yu's research and development team has gathered feedback from 550,000 households on their experience in using robots already available in the market. The data show that most users communicated with robots through voice interaction. Buyers reported that in the first week, users on average talked for 11 minutes with robots, while in the fifth week, the talking time was reduced to two minutes. To make human-robot communication more engaging, Yu suggested multimodal interactions for robots, which is a natural way of communication between humans involving text messaging, voice tones, expressions and actions.

According to the company, a Turing robot has 468 types of emotional voices, 120 tones and 88 sets of expressions and actions. It can recognize positive and negative emotions as well as explicit and implicit ones. That means the robot can tell whether a user is happy or sad and can assess how happy and sad he or she is through communication.

The Turing robots are also equipped with a self-studying engine. Thanks to big data support from more than 100,000 partners and the powerful data-processing ability of a super computer, Turing's self-learning speed has increased and it can now learn and process information in real time, the company said.

To bring domestic robots into ordinary families, several obstacles still need to be cleared, and a prominent obstacle is high costs. Currently, the best robot sold at $400,000 abroad costs $200,000 to produce, said Wu Gansha, Director of Intel Labs China, at a conference recently held in Beijing. The two quad-core central processing units inside cost up to $30,000, while an arm costs $40,000 and a hand $15,000, he explained. "We should explore how to lower the costs."

Yet, service robots have already begun to enter Chinese households. During the shopping festival of November 11, the sales of a floor-cleaning robot surged to the top 10 home appliances sold online in the country.

Infinite possibilities

Today's flourishing market for AI in China first started 30 years ago as the government launched the national 863 Program in 1985 to spur hi-tech research and development and listed robots as a research area. From his freshman year in college, Yu had studied AI under the instruction of He Zhongxiong, a well-known professor in this field. After graduation, he chose to focus on mobile Internet and developed a voice assistant for mobile phones.

"Back then, the market was very small for robots, and it was very difficult to produce them," Yu said. Zhu Pinpin, cofounder and CEO of Xiaoi Robot Co. Ltd., agreed with this assessment, saying that they also went through a very tough period from 2006 to 2009.

Xu Xiaolan, Secretary General of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, said that at that time, it was not clear how robots would be used and how to turn the technology into productivity. But "now we can clearly see how industrial robots, service robots and special robots can be used," Xu said.

Data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) show that industrial robots currently account for 80 percent of the world robot market. "Technological progress also makes it more feasible to turn AI into products, and huge market potential will draw more firms into the field."

The 2015 World Robot Statistics issued by the IFR show that sales of industrial robots jumped to around 57,000 in 2014, up 56 percent from the previous year. China already has the world's largest market in the sale of industrial robots, according to the report. "The robotics industry is exhibiting rapid growth--completely unperturbed by the current economic slump experienced by other areas of Chinese industry," Song Xiaogang, Secretary General of the China Robot Industry Alliance (CRIA), told the IFR.

On December 1, 2015, the China State Shipbuilding Corp. announced that it will build its first smart ship in Shanghai using AI technology. Construction of the i-DOLPHIN will start in September 2016 and be completed the following year.

At present, ship crews still mainly rely on their own experience to make navigation decisions, though unwise or ill-informed decision making can cause the loss of property or life. Meanwhile, vessels are getting more and more complicated to operate, and there are also strict environmental regulations that need to be adhered to.

Intelligent ships can improve navigation safety and efficiency through advanced information technologies including real-time data transmission and collection, powerful calculation, digital modeling and remote control. "Intelligent ships will be an inevitable trend in the shipmaking and navigation fields," predicted Fang Quan, Vice President of China State Shipbuilding Corp.

Copyedited by Mara Lee Durrell

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