Nation gears up for robotics race

China will ramp up resources to build a globally competitive robotics industry by attaching high importance to tackling core technological bottlenecks, an official from the country's top industry regulator said.

Luo Junjie, deputy director of the industrial equipment department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said more efforts are needed to cultivate high-end products after China produced over 130,000 industrial robots last year, accounting for one-third of the world's annual production volume.

"We have approved a plan to build a national robotics innovation center, which will focus on tackling common bottlenecks such as human-machine interaction technologies and compliant control," Luo said at a news conference for the 2018 World Robot Conference in Beijing.