Why is the UK lagging behind China Korea and Japan in robotic development?
Cardiff is lagging behind the rest of the world in the field of robotic development, according to a leading expert.
While countries like Japan and China are leading the development of new technology, research in the UK is being hampered by ethical concerns, says Malaysian academic Esyin Chew.
“One of the main reasons of this situation is that the Britain concern the legal social ethical and cultural concerns,” said Esyin Chew, a doctor of Cardiff metropolitan university, “So, before everything is in place, you would not see many robots in people’s daily life.”
So far, there are three universities in Wales doing researches on robotics: Cardiff university puts its emphasis on education and healthcare, Cardiff metropolitan university focuses on promoting robots to the public and Aberystwyth university is keen to robotic engineering for science.
“The applications of robots in Cardiff are really behind the times, especially in the area of business marketing compared to Japan, South Korea, China and so on”
“In fact, the Wales government is incredibly supportive of this robotic research, which means the funding is sufficient. But, personally, I believe the biggest obstacle is about people-the polarizing view.
“Some of them are in favour of robots and cannot wait to see them applying to their life, meanwhile, the others like policy maker hold an opposite opinion that robots may replace manual work and affect the board line between human and robots.”
In this case, the development of robots in Cardiff is relatively slow. And there are still many difficulties should be overcome.