Albert Yefimov, head of the Skolkovo Foundation's Robotics Center, has written an article for thedisruptory.com, an online resource devoted to innovative technology including robotics, on the Russian robotics industry, popular attitudes to robots in Russia and what kind of robots the country is producing. Read an extract of the article below, and for a full version of the article, click here.
As I discovered a few years back, Russia is a country with roboticists but not robots. We have almost the world’s highest number of engineering graduates proficient in robotics but we are second to last worldwide in terms of the number of industrial robots deployed in our country. This peculiarity is unique among not only BRICS but also around the globe. According to a prominent Russian educational portal, there are 30 universities that offer ‘robotics and mechatronics’ engineering majors for undergraduate students, with Moscow and St. Petersburg alone hosting more than one-third of them.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), estimated annual shipments of multipurpose industrial robots for 2013 totaled 615 units in Russia compared to 18,297 units in Germany and 2,161 in France. The average robot density (number of robots per 10,000 workers) is below 10 in Russia while the average figure worldwide is 62 (2013 figures), the highest levels being 437 in Korea, followed by Japan (323) and Germany (273).
Yet this is not the full story. It was long ago noted that the Soviet film industry never produced any type of aggressive or military robots. All of the stories told about robotics in Soviet science fiction were about funny, kind electronic creatures that strictly obeyed Asimov’s laws. Asimov’s writings were also very popular in the USSR and translated freely as he was considered as a very progressive American writer (contrary to Phillip F. *** who was never translated in the USSR and started to be known only in the new Russia). This vision is very distinctive from the Hollywood stories of the same era or later: the American-born myths on robotics shown on the big screen were mostly about robots’ rage against their human lords.
To read the continuation, click here.