MOEA Establishes Smart Robot R&D Center, Focusing on 4 Applications Including Healthcare and Logistics

(CNA, Taipei, May 19, by reporter Tseng Yun-ting) The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) announced today that it has collaborated with the National Development Council (NDC) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) to create the 'Intelligent Robotics Innovation and Application R&D Center,' officially established at the Industrial Technology Research Institute's (ITRI) Lioujia Campus. The center will focus on four major application areas: medical care, logistics and warehousing, food and beverage services, and inspection and disaster relief. It aims to link bases in Tainan's Shalun and Liuying to form an 'AI industry golden triangle' in Tainan, helping Taiwanese manufacturers break into the global smart robotics supply chain. The MOEA stated that the government is actively promoting the 'AI New Top 10 Construction Projects.' Following the Executive Yuan's approval of the smart robotics industry promotion plan, the MOEA's Department of Industrial Technology has planned to invest NT$3 billion over four years to support ITRI in building the center. MOEA Vice Minister Ho Chin-tsang said the R&D center will provide services such as robot system integration, AI perception and decision-making, key module development, and field validation. It will also strengthen the development of software and hardware systems and simulation platforms for service robots, shortening the distance from R&D to application. Ho pointed out that the center will incorporate business model planning from the early stages of technology development and will link the Lioujia and Shalun sites to help businesses conduct customized validation and optimization, accelerating product time-to-market. The goal is to assist Taiwanese manufacturers in moving beyond component supply to exporting total solutions. The Department of Industrial Technology stated that the center's core missions will be to serve as an empirical sandbox and a startup incubator, providing a technology validation and application testing environment to help startups and SMEs commercialize their technologies for industrial application. The center will also act as a startup accelerator, providing not only incubation space but also high-end GPU computing power. This will allow for the simultaneous running of applications such as large-scale Universal Scene Description (USD), real-time ray tracing rendering, and digital twin physics simulations to help startups with model training and validation. Furthermore, the center will assist startup teams with business strategy, market positioning, and matching with investment resources, including venture capital from the National Development Fund, hoping to foster the growth of local startups into medium-to-large enterprises. The Department of Industrial Technology noted that the MOEA has long invested R&D resources in southern Taiwan to promote technological development and industrial transformation. In the past three years, it has assisted over 400 companies in Tainan with technology upgrades and has developed key technologies such as high-frequency, high-power compound semiconductors. In the future, it will further focus on AI and smart robotics, linking with the NSTC's 'Intelligent Robotics Research Center' in Tainan's Shalun and the 'Intelligent Robotics Industrial Cluster' in Tainan's Liuying to integrate components, AI models, and complete system services, thereby driving industry-academia-research collaboration and accelerating mass production and real-world application of products. (Editor: Pan Yi-ching) 11505