Deregulation Roadmap for Robot Industry Unveiled
The South Korea government released a roadmap for deregulation in the robot industry on Oct. 28. According to the roadmap, next year’s national budget for the industry is 194.4 billion won, 32 percent larger than this year’s, and the government will concentrate on manufacturing and service robots to join the global top four by 2023.
Specifically, the largest portion of the budget will be spent on robots in the three manufacturing industry segments of basic, textile and food and beverage and the four service industry segments of logistics, medical, wearable device and care.
The roadmap contains a total of 33 specific tasks. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, 16 other ministries and government agencies, and experts from the industry and the academia prepared the tasks for about six months. The roadmap is roughly divided into three phases. The first from 2020 to 2022 is for simple assistance, the second from 2023 to 2025 is for collaboration and coexistence with human users, and the third starting in 2026 is for autonomous task handling.
The ministry predicted four main application models along with service expansion scenarios. The models pertain to industry (e.g. manufacturing, construction and agriculture), commerce (e.g. delivery, parking and cooking), medical, and public service (e.g. firefighting and police service). The purpose of the roadmap is to pre-eliminate regulations anticipated from the scenarios and regulations in the industry will come into play only when necessary and to the minimum extent possible.