Gov't Cultivates Gifted Manpower in Robotics Field

Korea sets a target of becoming among world's top three robot powerhouses by 2013

The following are excerpts of an interview between NewsWorld and Weon Young-jun, a team leader of the Growth Engine Policy Division at the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE), who spoke about government policies to foster the robot industry as a future core growth engine.
Question: Will you tell our readers of the purpose and plans of a program to nourish gifted manpower in the convergence and multi-disciplinary robot field?
Answer: The MKE has established and has been implementing a program to foster gifted manpower in the convergence and complex robot field as part of the government's efforts to cultivate 100,000 young leaders of forward-looking industries. The plan to nurture 100,000 young leaders, announced by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance (MOSF) last September, calls for an investment of 1 trillion won over five years.
The manpower development program calls for nurturing about 3,000 master's and doctoral degree holders with robot expertise over five years, including 320 gifted people in 2009 through academic programs in the industry-academia-research robot centers and robot graduate schools. To this end, it will set aside approximately 30 billion won to be spent over five years until 2013, including 3.5 billion won for this year, in order to provide diverse support measures, including masters- and doctoral-level degree courses for hired employees and internship programs to address a shortage of gifted manpower facing robot manufacturers, more than 90 percent of which are SMEs.
Q: Will you give details of the consortia that have been selected to undertake the robot manpower development project?
A: Nine consortia ― a robot university graduate school consortium and eight industry-academia robot center consortia ― have been selected as of the end this past April as the winners of the project calling for financing 3.5 billion won for 2009 to cultivate 320 specialists in the robot field.
The robot university graduate school consortium comprising of Hanyang University, Inha University and Pusan National University will be financed with 960 million won for opening programs for majoring in overall robot technology areas, including robot control and sensor, robot intelligence and recognition, robot software and robot design and drawing. About 100 students will be selected for the second half of 2009 and the first half of next year.
The guidelines for selecting the winners of the project stipulates the provision of additional points to consortiums containing universities from provincial areas in order to enhance SMEs' employment rate of graduates as well as financing 80 percent of tuition for students who have signed employment contracts with SMEs after graduation. An SMEs?employment rate will be considered when selecting entities tasked with performing the future manpower development project.
Short-term programs for reeducating industry employees for non-regular courses will be opened, and the Capstone Design Program of Hanyang University will allow joint research among professors, students and companies on badly-needed research tasks, which will benefit the companies as well as give students more chances to gain field experience.
The managers of the eight industry-academia robot center consortia are Hanyang University, Korea University, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Pusan National University and Pohang University of Science and Technology. Each industry-academia robot center will be financed with 300 million won yearly for a maximum of five years.
The robot manpower project is designed not only to provide support to master's and doctoral degree holders in polishing their R&D capability in detailed robot technologies including intelligence, manipulation, recognition/vision and actuator/sensor, but also to revitalize industry-academia collaboration in such areas as joint research, solution of field-oriented technology woes and technology transfer.
Q: Will you elaborate on the government's mid- and long-term plans to nurture robot manpower?
A: Robot manpower development experts have proposed cultivating convergence and multi-disciplinary manpower in order to brace for converging such robot technologies as those in the medical field and other disciplines as part of ways to expand robot graduate schools and industry-academia robot research centers. They have suggested the government's efforts to focus on cultivating university students tailored to meet industry-specific demands by expanding the existing convergence and multi-disciplinary robot expertise manpower development system.
In this regard, the MKE plans to work out comprehensive policies to cultivate manpower in the robot industry with the goal of developing Korea into a world? top-three robot powerhouses by 2013. They are designed to cultivate convergence and multi-disciplinary manpower, which will dominate new markets, working-level manpower suiting field work well and project leader level, high-caliber, expert manpower.
The plan to nurture manpower in the robot industry by 2013 will be established by the end of this year by making the most of the Robot Manpower Development Sector Council, to be formed as an industry-academia-research organization. In 2009, the robot industry became the first industry sector to receive government support in surveying qualitative and quantitative demand in manpower under the manpower resources development sector council project.
Q: Will you describe the current status of the Korean robot industry and measures to foster the industry?
A: Following automobiles and PCs, the intelligent robot emerges as a representative end-user product of the 21st century that will serve as a future core growth engine to drive an era of $40,000 per-capita income. The industry is expected to provide a new convergence foundation with wider spillover effects to other industries, as the information technology industry has done. Korea is the most suitable place to grow the robot industry given the development of diverse, related industries, advanced IT infrastructure, uniformed life environment and a swift adoption of state-of-the-art technologies.
The global robot market is predicted to surge from $8.26 billion in 2007 to $30 billion in 2013 and $100 billion in 2018. If robot technology applications into unmanned automobiles, unmanned defense systems and other industries are counted, the global market is forecast to grow into a $220 billion immense market around 2018.
Recognizing the significance of the robot industry, front-running companies in the United States, Japan and other advanced countries are scrambling to aggressively invest in the sector.
Korea ranked fifth in the world with the size of the robot market estimated at about 895.7 billion won as of 2008, an 18.8 percent surge over the previous year.
The Korean government has invested 574.8 billion won in the industry in the seven years since 2002, representing an annual average investment of 82.1 billion won. The government's financial support for raising technology capability has paid off: Korea's gap in the commercialization of robot technologies compared to advanced countries has been reduced from four years in 2003 to 2.1 years in 2008.
Despite this achievement, the Korean robot industry is struggling to address such problems as a lack of original and principal technologies and the slowing expansion of the robot market stemming from a lack of the perfection of robot products.
Korea sets its sights on evolving into being among the world's top-three robot powerhouses by 2013 and the leader by 2018. The vision unveiled by the government calls for raising Korea's share in the global robot market from the current 8.9 percent to 13.3 percent in the first phase until 2013 and 20 percent in the second phase by 2018 with domestic production forecast to surge from the current 900 billion won to 4 trillion won in 2013 and 20 trillion won in 2018.
The government has strategies to foster the Korean robot industry. The strategy for expanding the current market is designed to focus support on technology and business commercialization of robot products put on the market and the creation of demand. The strategy for creating new markets with a five-year time horizon calls for seizing technologies and market through technology development, demand creation and infrastructure buildup of prospective mainstay products including robots for leisure, surveillance, surgery, firefighting, silver industry and transportation, for example. The strategy for advancing technology development with a 10-year time horizon is designed to break the original technology barriers and ramp up industrial constitution for the production of market-oriented products, including robots for maids' work, wearables, underwater/aviation and bionics, for example. nw

Weon Young-jun, a team leader of the Growth Engine Policy Division at the Ministry of Knowledge Economy.