Dutch robot centre opens as Europe tries to close gap with China’s fast-moving humanoid race

SCHIEDAM (Netherlands), July 3 — In a squat building housed on a drab business park just outside Rotterdam, sleek white humanoid robots scuttle around, accompanied by a grey robotic dog performing various canine tricks.

Welcome to the Humanoid Application Center: a hub that opened Thursday to bring together firms, researchers and technicians with the aim of closing Europe’s yawning robotics gap with the United States and China.

Humanoid robotics technology is advancing at a breakneck speed, boosted even further by artificial intelligence, said the centre’s chief executive officer Evert Jaap Lugt.

“In five years from now, you will not see the difference anymore between a human being and a robot if you are, let’s say, five metres away from it,” Lugt, 66, told AFP in an interview, as humanoids whizzed around behind him.

Lugt forecast a future where dead loved-ones are replaced in the home by humanoid “companion robots” that look and act just like the departed person but with AI-powered super brains.

The centre aims to link companies with technicians to harness humanoid robots to solve problems in the corporate sector.

One corporate boss, real estate director Niels Langenhuizen, told AFP he planned to introduce the first humanoid robot onto one of his building sites by the end of the year.

His company builds pre-fab houses in a bid to ease the housing crisis crippling the Netherlands but he said he was limited by employing only humans.

“As long as we depend on manual labour, we’re never going to reach 24/7 (production) and we’re never going to get to 100,000 houses a year,” he said, referring to the Dutch government’s target.

“We need humanoids to be able to speed up this process, to make housing more affordable, to make it more flexible, to make it quicker,” the 41-year-old Langenhuizen told AFP.

Lugt said the aim of the HAC centre was to “kickstart” a European fightback in the domain of robotics that is totally dominated by China.

Robots of all shapes and sizes can be seen in many places in China, from hotels to shopping centres and in factories.

The country accounted for 85 per cent of the world’s humanoid installations last year, according to Barclays bank.

“Europe is almost nowhere, like always, with all these new technologies. And this is really terrifying. Because this is about the future earning models of our society,” said Lugt.

“We are lagging behind. So the only opportunity we probably have is that we look at appliances and also the adoption of this technology. Maybe we can lead over that.” — AFP