By 2002, it's expected to have under its belt almost 370,000 industrial robots, compared with 120,000 in the United States and 15,000 in Britain. Government and industry investment runs to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Japanese developers are doubling their efforts to build an army of robots for entertainment, domestic and professional-services roles. Japan's most recent inventions have come somewhat as a surprise to its global rivals. Traditionally, many in the U.S. and Europe have assumed Japan was good at the mechanical side of robotics but lagged in the creative process.
Japan is clearly the most robotics-oriented country.
Elsewhere in Asia, serious robotics efforts are just warming up, notably in South Korea and Singapore. While government support for next-generation robots in Japan is much higher than in Western industrial countries, it's the corporate sector that's most responsible for pushing robots further along the evolutionary path. Japanese television viewers recently were treated to a peculiar commercial. What appears to be a space stormtrooper climbs the stairs of a New York City subway exit. The metallic creature's natural gait seems to be a dead giveaway that it's merely a costume with a person inside.