This article is selected from the Chinese Academy of Engineering journal “China Engineering Science”, 2022, Issue 4.
Authors: Mo Yang, Wang Yao-nan, Liu Jie, Miao Zhi-qiang, Zhang Xin, Jiang Wei-lai
Source: Strategic Research on Core Chip Technology Development for Intelligent Robots in China[J]. China Engineering Science, 2022, 24(4): 62-73.
Editor’s Note
Intelligent robots are leading a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation globally. Robots are the carriers of chip technology research, and chips are the guarantees for the realization of robot functions. Cultivating and promoting the development of core chip technology and industry for intelligent robots in China, and proposing feasible development routes for autonomous and controllable dedicated chips for intelligent robots, are of significant industrial value and strategic significance for solving the “bottleneck” problem in robot development, promoting industrial optimization and upgrading, and achieving a leap in productivity.
Academician Wang Yao-nan’s research team from the Chinese Academy of Engineering published an article titled “Strategic Research on Core Chip Technology Development for Intelligent Robots in China” in the 2022, Issue 4 of the journal “China Engineering Science”. The article elaborates on the important value of core chip technology for intelligent robots in promoting technological autonomy and controllability, achieving high-quality economic development, meeting the needs of residents for a better life, and enhancing the core competitiveness of the country; it reviews the international progress in related policies, technologies, and industries, analyzes China’s foundational advantages and challenges in developing core chips for intelligent robots; and demonstrates the development route for China’s intelligent robot chip technology through a multi-architecture approach and technical scheme comparison, proposing development strategies for the field and forming key tasks and a development roadmap for 2035. The article suggests elevating the autonomous and controllable development of intelligent robot chips to a national strategy, clarifying top-level design; establishing major scientific and technological projects for intelligent robot chips, increasing investment in scientific research funding; implementing policies that incentivize research and industrial application of intelligent robot chip technologies, driving industrial chain upgrades; and implementing measures for talent training and development in intelligent robot chips to promote healthy technological and industrial development.
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1. Introduction
Intelligent robots, as representative achievements of a new round of technological and industrial revolutions, involve research and manufacturing across multiple disciplines, including artificial intelligence, mechanical engineering, control theory, materials, and computer science. The industrial chain is extensive and has strong driving capabilities, making it a strategic industry for promoting the transformation and upgrading of major sectors such as industry, agriculture, and national defense in China. It is also an important indicator of a country’s technological innovation strength. As intelligent robots gradually integrate into human production and life, they face increasingly diverse environments and increasingly complex tasks. High reliability, high dynamics, and strong resistance requirements for intelligent robots’ algorithms and computing power pose high demands, but China remains relatively weak in the field of core high-performance chips required for robots. The ability for independent research and production of core components lags far behind international leading levels, with poor performance in computing power, stability, and integration levels. As the international situation becomes increasingly severe, with escalating Sino-US trade frictions and intensifying anti-globalization trends, strengthening domestic manufacturing capabilities and mastering the leading power in emerging industries, as well as achieving autonomous and controllable chip technology and its industrial chain for intelligent robots, has become urgent.
Currently, the research on core chips for intelligent robots in China is still in its infancy, and formulating reasonable strategic plans is crucial for its development. Existing studies have systematically reviewed the current status of development in intelligent robots and chip technologies and proposed development strategy recommendations. Related studies have focused on the development status of core hardware and software for artificial intelligence in terms of technology, industry, and policy, summarizing issues such as the incomplete ecological system, shortcomings in basic theoretical research, and an imperfect innovation environment that China faces, and proposed ideas and goals for its technological and industrial development. Targeting land and air collaborative multi-modal intelligent robots, the development status of such robots is analyzed, pointing out their lack of systematic development planning, the absence of a full-chain development model, insufficient hardware-software integration, and providing corresponding development suggestions. The concept, classification, and development history of artificial intelligence chips are introduced, along with a survey and assessment of the current status and trends in the industry, and suggestions for the development of the artificial intelligence chip industry are proposed. The group compiling “Advanced Semiconductor Materials and Auxiliary Materials” has proposed systematic development of semiconductor and auxiliary materials, upstream and downstream collaborative development, and sustainable development ideas, forming relevant policy recommendations for integrated circuit development. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and 15 other departments have jointly issued the “14th Five-Year Plan for Robot Industry Development”, providing development guidance for China’s intelligent robot industry.
Robots are the carriers of chip technology research, and chips are the guarantees for the realization of robot functions, and the development of both has profound intrinsic connections, which is a point that current research has not deeply explored. Therefore, the Chinese Academy of Engineering has timely initiated related research on the global and critical issues of autonomous and controllable development of core chips for intelligent robots, aiming to sort out strategic planning, demonstrate technological paths, and propose technical solutions. This article analyzes the important value and international progress of core chips for intelligent robots, summarizes China’s foundational advantages and challenges, and focuses on demonstrating technological development routes while proposing a development roadmap for 2035, aiming to provide references for national industrial policies, technological planning, and technological breakthroughs.
2. Strategic Significance of Developing Core Chips for Intelligent Robots
Core chips for intelligent robots are high-performance processors specifically used to achieve computational functions such as perception, control, navigation, decision-making, and planning for robots, and are key to completing various operational tasks in complex environments. Through research on the strategic development of core chip technology for intelligent robots, ideas for related technological research can be provided, promoting the autonomy and controllability of the technology chain and industrial chain, and facilitating high-quality economic development.
(1) An Important Track for Promoting Technological Autonomy and Controllability
Currently, the core chip industry for intelligent robots faces severe internal and external challenges. The internal challenge lies in the severe inadequacy of core technologies in the robot chip industry chain, with a very low localization rate. Domestic chip packaging and testing are initially controllable, but the autonomy rate in high-end sectors such as design and manufacturing is severely lacking; the external challenge is the current international situation of great power competition, where Western countries have imposed restrictions on China’s high-end equipment, materials, and technologies, and have implemented embargoes on advanced chips to curb China’s development. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out verification of intelligent robot core chip technology solutions, design chip computing architectures based on algorithm model characteristics, and optimize algorithm models and compilation according to the computing architecture to achieve high performance, low power consumption, and low latency goals, promoting parallel development of both “straight path chasing” and “lane changing overtaking”, actively seizing the high ground of integrated circuit technology innovation and enhancing the autonomous controllability of the technology chain and industrial chain for core chips for intelligent robots.
(2) An Important Support for Achieving High-Quality Economic Development
Intelligent robots are high-end equipment that integrates technologies from multiple fields and are products of technological integration and innovation between industries. The development of core chip technology can enhance the operational and adaptive capabilities of intelligent robots, further releasing the demand for intelligent robots, thereby driving technological upgrades and product structure optimization across the entire industrial chain, having a significant effect on revitalizing the real economy, and becoming an important means of transforming the economy from virtual to real. Vigorously developing intelligent robots and their core chip technologies can drive comprehensive improvements in the manufacturing industry, becoming a breakthrough for building a manufacturing powerhouse. Furthermore, as a representative industry of the information revolution, the development of the intelligent robot core chip industry can further integrate emerging technologies such as big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and 5G communication, constructing a new industrial system and becoming the “locomotive” driving China’s high-quality economic development.
(3) An Important Guarantee for Meeting People’s Needs for a Better Life
The main contradiction in Chinese society has transformed into the contradiction between the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development. The development of core chip technology for intelligent robots can enhance the application scope of intelligent robots, significantly improving social productivity, liberating people from repetitive mechanical labor, and creating more higher-level and quality job opportunities; the enhancement of adaptability in intelligent robots can also increase the demand for specialized operations, keeping people away from dangerous tasks, and playing an important role in firefighting, law enforcement, search and rescue, and bomb disposal tasks; the large-scale utilization of intelligent robots can effectively enhance production efficiency, thereby reducing consumption and pollution during the production process. Promoting the development of the intelligent robot industry can effectively save resources and reduce emissions, becoming an important support for building a “dual-type society”.
(4) An Important Carrier for Enhancing National Core Competitiveness
Vigorously promoting the development of core chip technology and industry for intelligent robots helps safeguard national defense security and seize the global technological high ground, thereby effectively enhancing the core competitiveness of the country. Currently, unmanned warfare has gradually become the mainstream of modern warfare. Unmanned systems, as a type of intelligent robot with autonomous mobility capabilities, rely on the computing processing capabilities of core chips for intelligent robots for situational awareness, planning and decision-making, multi-machine collaboration, and motion control. This research project helps promote military intelligence development and advance the modernization of China’s national defense. Moreover, core chips for robots, as typical products of a new round of technological revolution, are an important indicator of a country’s technological innovation strength. China currently has great development potential in this area, and vigorously developing core chips for robots can rapidly promote the development of relevant high-tech industries in China, enhancing the country’s core competitiveness.
3. International Development Status of Core Chips for Intelligent Robots
(1) In Terms of Policy Planning
In recent years, the global chip shortage has severely impacted all intelligent industries. Major developed countries and regions worldwide have formulated a series of policy plans for chip development, comprehensively laying out technology innovation, interface standards, and financial plans to seize the leading power in chip technology development.
In 2020, the United States launched the “2020 American Semiconductor Manufacturing Act”, suggesting that Congress tighten the bottlenecks in chip manufacturing technology to prevent China from surpassing the U.S. in the coming years. Subsequently, the “2021 U.S. Innovation and Competition Act” (USICA) was introduced to advocate for tough countermeasures against China, enhancing the competitiveness of the U.S. in technology against China. In 2020, the European Commission issued the “Joint Declaration on the European Processor and Semiconductor Technology Plan”, expecting to invest €145 billion to support the development of the semiconductor industry. In 2020, Japan released its “Green Growth Strategy”, prioritizing the semiconductor industry as a key development area. In 2020, South Korea announced an investment of $950 million over the next five years to develop materials technology for semiconductor lithography below 5 nm.
All traditional chip powerhouses intend to rely on their rich experience, strong innovation capabilities, and robust economic strength, under the guidance of policies and regulations, to reach consensus through national strategies and direct advantageous resources to the chip field, thereby leading a new round of technological revolution and further strengthening their competitive advantages.
(2) In Terms of Technology
In the wave of a new round of technological revolution, the application scenarios and operational demands for robots are becoming increasingly complex, raising higher requirements for their environmental perception, decision-making and planning, navigation and positioning, and motion control algorithms. Currently, computing systems based on general embedded processors and programmable logic controllers cannot meet the future needs for robots’ perception, cognitive abilities, and agile motion capabilities. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop core chips for robots under new circumstances, integrating the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to enhance robots’ intelligent autonomy.
In terms of intelligent robot algorithms, the empowerment of artificial intelligence has brought about rapid development:
1. Artificial intelligence has improved environmental perception efficiency. For target recognition, classic frameworks such as SSD, YOLO, R-CNN have been proposed, allowing intelligent robots to simulate the computational methods of the human brain and significantly enhancing their ability to perceive the environment through multi-layer convolutional neural networks;
2. Artificial intelligence has enhanced planning and decision-making capabilities. The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has greatly improved the autonomy of intelligent robots in planning and decision-making, enabling them to carry out operational tasks normally even in high-dynamic, highly complex, and strong adversarial environments;
3. Artificial intelligence has strengthened multi-machine collaborative capabilities. Based on “mobile energy and information interconnection” and centered around “model algorithms and data computation”, intelligent robots can achieve autonomous operations, human-machine collaboration, and machine-machine collaboration, which will become the primary mode of future intelligent robot applications. Artificial intelligence technology provides strong technical support in interoperability, autonomous decision-making, and swarm control algorithms.
In terms of intelligent robot computing hardware, it is facing the issue of the failure of Moore’s Law and is gradually developing in multiple directions such as high energy efficiency, specialization, and customization:
1. In the architecture of general artificial intelligence chips, there is a gradual evolution towards brain-like and neuromorphic designs. In 2019, Tsinghua University released the world’s first heterogeneous brain-like chip, “Tianji”, enabling bicycles to achieve true autonomous driving and making it to the cover of Nature;
2. In manufacturing processes, chip manufacturing has entered the atomic age. In 2021, Hunan University, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and others published a review article in Nature, discussing key material parameters for two-dimensional semiconductors and traditional three-dimensional semiconductors, summarizing paths to push the limits of two-dimensional transistors;
3. In chip design, future artificial intelligence (AI) automatic design may be realized. In 2021, the Google Brain team collaborated with Stanford University to publish a paper in Nature that improved AI-based chip design methods, applying them to the next-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU v4) accelerator product officially released at the Google I/O 2021 conference.
In the integration of intelligent robot algorithms and chip hardware, brain-like chips represent a naturally energy-efficient solution for implementing intelligent algorithms. It is well-known that algorithms, computing power, and data are the three driving forces behind the development of artificial intelligence technology. The introduction of artificial intelligence technology has enhanced the algorithmic effectiveness of robots, and various sensors have introduced massive amounts of data for robots, with brain-like chips becoming the carriers for algorithms and data. The architecture of the information processing unit in intelligent robot chips is also gradually shifting towards a bionic brain structure, with “storage-computation integration” brain-like chips becoming the foundation for innovations in artificial intelligence technology, possessing high energy efficiency advantages in running certain intelligent algorithms. The non-volatile core devices at the bottom are also gradually replacing volatile core devices, thereby better realizing intelligent computing functions in unstructured environments and complex tasks.
(3) In Terms of Industry
The core chip technology for intelligent robots involves multiple industries, including semiconductors, robotics, and artificial intelligence. In the semiconductor field, the market concentration of processing and manufacturing equipment is high, with companies from the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan monopolizing over 90% of the global chip manufacturing market. Overall, foreign countries are in a strong position in the chip industry chain, dominating the three main stages of chip design, manufacturing, and packaging/testing. In the robotics field, major industrial robot companies are mainly concentrated in developed industrial countries such as Japan, the United States, and Germany.
Therefore, internationally, the core chip industry for intelligent robots has already formed a series of commercialization platforms. In November 2017, Intel’s China Research Institute officially released the HERO robot platform, a low-power, high-performance, compact heterogeneous system platform solution designed specifically for intelligent robots (including service robots, medical robots, and autonomous vehicles). In this solution, the central processing unit (CPU) serves as the control center, paired with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and other specialized accelerator chips to provide excellent performance. In December 2018, NVIDIA released the world’s first chip designed specifically for robots, the Jetson AGX Xavier. As the first computer designed for autonomous machines, the Jetson AGX Xavier has sufficient performance to complete tasks such as visual ranging, sensor fusion, positioning and mapping, obstacle detection, and route planning, which is crucial for the next generation of robots. In June 2020, Qualcomm launched its iterative product, the RB5 robot platform, becoming Qualcomm’s most advanced and highly integrated overall solution designed for robots, providing a rich combination of hardware, software, and development tools to assist developers and manufacturers in creating next-generation intelligent robots with low power consumption and high computing power, meeting the requirements of consumer, enterprise, industrial, and professional service sectors.
4. China’s Foundational Advantages and Challenges in Developing Core Chips for Intelligent Robots
(1) Foundational Advantages
1. China actively cultivates an environment for the development of core chips for intelligent robots.
The country has always attached great importance to the development of basic science and high-tech industries. In various national top-level macro policies, support for high-tech industries such as robotics/chips has been prominently highlighted. The “14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035” released in March 2021 further proposed tackling integrated circuit technology in frontier scientific fields, promoting innovation and development in integrated circuits, robotics, and other industries, and enhancing the core competitiveness of manufacturing. Meanwhile, relevant national ministries have issued a series of policy documents on special planning, policy support, import-export investment, regional development, and industrial matching to cultivate markets and talents for the domestic robotics/chip industry. Compared with other countries, the socialist system with Chinese characteristics can maximally integrate social resources, concentrating efforts through macro control, policy planning, and financial means to ensure the development of core chips for intelligent robots.
2. China’s vast domestic market provides strong momentum for the development of core chips for intelligent robots.
Currently, China’s chip market is expanding, with chip output value increasing year by year. Statistics show that in the past five years, China’s chip industry has achieved a compound annual growth rate of over 21%, nearly five times the global growth rate during the same period. According to the World Semiconductor Industry Association, China’s market scale has achieved rapid growth, with a market share of 50.7%, ranking first globally. China has become an indispensable part of the global chip market. According to relevant departments, in recent years, China’s robotics industry system has achieved an average annual compound growth rate of over 15%, with the industry scale exceeding 100 billion yuan. The significant expansion of integrated applications has led to a robot density in domestic manufacturing that reached 187 units per 10,000 people as early as 2019, significantly higher than the global average. In the service robot sector, the market expansion rate is even more rapid. According to relevant data, from 2013 to 2021, the annual compound growth rate of global service robot sales was 19.2%, and by 2021, its share in the robot market had reached 36%. The vast domestic market is the strongest driving force for the development of core chips for intelligent robots.
3. China has the most complete industrial system and a solid industrial foundation.
China is the world’s largest manufacturing country, with a complete industrial system covering 39 major industrial categories, 191 medium categories, and 525 small categories in the United Nations industrial classification, with output value ranking first globally. A complete industrial system can significantly reduce production costs and improve production efficiency, providing foundational support for the development of core chips for intelligent robots. The level of the chip-related industry, especially the robotics industry chain, continues to improve, and China’s robotics industry scale has rapidly grown, forming a relatively complete robotics industry system. The development level of the robotics industry has entered the world’s top tier, and with the rapid development of