Japan sets up new agency to promote robot use

Recently, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan announced the establishment of a new functional agency, the Robot- Friendly Facilities Promotion Agency. The establishment of this agency aims to accelerate the "realization of a robot-friendly environment" and plans to release and promote related projects in four areas and identify pilot enterprises.

It is understood that "robot-friendly" is a new concept proposed by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan in 2019, which refers to adjusting the site environment to facilitate the work of robots. To this end, a "Robot Installation Model Construction Promotion Working Group" (referred to as the Working Group) was set up to promote the project.

The concept of "robot-friendly" was proposed mainly to solve the dilemma of not being able to introduce robots on a large scale. Robots were introduced mainly to solve various problems such as lack of manpower, but in reality, they have not been used on a large scale in various fields as originally expected.

For example, manufacturing is one of the fields where robots have been introduced on a large scale. Robots have been used to realize automatic production lines in automobile and electrical appliance factories, contributing to improving production efficiency and solving various problems such as labor shortage.

However, robots have not been used on a large scale as expected in other fields. The main reason is that currently introduced robots must be customized according to the working environment, which leads to a significant increase in introduction and operation costs. In order to get rid of this mindset of "customizing robots according to the environment", the concept of "robot-friendly" was born.

In order to achieve "robot-friendliness", the working group has been promoting basic projects such as "Innovative Robot Research and Development Construction" since 2020. In addition to determining the winning companies for each pilot project this year, the establishment of this organization has also added the field of facility management with the industry as the main body.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan believes that the cooperation between robot user companies and robot integration system companies is crucial to achieve "robot-friendliness". According to the results of the discussion between the working group and the representative companies on project support measures, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has identified four key areas, namely "facility management", "food", "retail" and "logistics warehouse", to accelerate the implementation of the "robot-friendly" pilot project.