Spurred by Donald Trump’s push for industrial reshoring, Chinese robot manufacturers are aiming to enter into the American market.
Produced in large numbers and at relatively low cost by Chinese firms, these industrial robots would first take on menial logistics tasks, potentially paving the way for more advanced humanoid successors.
But this influx of Chinese robots might come with a catch: the harvesting of factories’ sensitive data. So warned a rival American executive, who said this week that high-end industrial robots are able to collect “massive amounts” of data and intellectual property. Daniel Diez, the chief business officer of Agility Robotics, warned that a walking robot equipped with depth-sensitive cameras would pose enough of a privacy risk that American and European buyers might reject them.
