Vietnam dreams of a developed robot industry

The Hanoitimes - Vietnamese scientists believe that domestic enterprises have sufficient capability and intelligence to make the robots that serve industrial production at the prices much lower than the imports.

According to Tran Thanh Thuy, former Deputy Head of the Electronics, Informatics and Automation Research Institute, an arm of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Vietnam has taken initially steps over the last 25 years which have brought initial achievements in the robot industry.

The robotics research works conducted so far in Vietnam related to kinematics, dynamics, trajectory design, information processing sensors, actuators, intelligence control and development.

In particular, in the field of robot controllers, besides the traditional methods like PID and momentum calculation, Vietnamese scientists have also carried out research following smart controller methods such as fuzzy logic or genetic algorithm. The scientific research works have been published o­n domestic and international science journals and publications, or presented at international robotics conferences.

However, Thuy affirmed that to date, Vietnam still has not had a robotics industry. Especially, the state’s policies also have not mentioned the development of the robotics industry at the moment and in the future. Some Vietnamese enterprises have made robot products, but they have been just groping around to find the way they should follow, while it’s still unclear about the fate of the industry.

Theoretically, Vietnamese scientists are completely capable to develop smart robots. However, they are facing too many barriers to follow their way. The technical infrastructure remains very poor, the supporting industries have not developed, while the market remains small which makes the production costs higher.

Therefore, Thuy believes that in the immediate time, Vietnam should focus o­n developing industrial robots.

Vietnamese people are believed to be very intelligent and their intelligence is in no way inferior to that in regional countries or in the world. That explains why at the Asian robocon competitions, Vietnamese teams always win high prizes. 

The national robocon competitions always attract high numbers of competitors, which show the eagerness of Vietnamese students to the robotics technology. In 2002, o­nly several teams participated in the competition, while there are now hundreds of teams from different universities and junior colleges.

In Vietnam, Tosy has been known as the pioneer in the robotics industry. Developing robots in the context of the weak domestic supporting industries and the limited conditions for scientific research, but Tosy still has been cherishing the ambitious plan of “creating a revolution in the low-cost industrial robot industry”.

Some foreign partners, after seeing the industrial robots made by Tosy at Automatica 2010, have expressed their intention to become the distributors of Tosy in foreign countries. These include Motoman, an industrial robot manufacturer from Japan plans to cooperate with Tosy to provide low cost robots to the Japanese and US markets.

A big competitive edge of Tosy is the low production cost of its products. An industrial robot displayed at Automatica 2010 in Munic, Germany reportedly had the price just equal to ¼ of the same products made by other companies.

Thuy has agreed that developing low cost robots that serve industrial production is absolutely within the reach of Vietnamese. However, he said that Vietnamese people can design the software to control robots, or manufacture electronic circuits, which are called “the soul” of the robots. 

Meanwhile, it would meet big difficulties in manufacturing the “bodies” of the robots, mainly because of the weak supporting industries. Therefore, Thuy thinks that the robotics industry will be able to develop if the state gives support to enterprises.