FUTURE POLICY FOR THE ROBOTICS INDUSTRY
Japan’s robotics industry is not new-it began to establish its international predominance in the 1970s. In the field of humanoid robots in particular, the industry boasts some extremely advanced technology With the scale of the industry amounting to about 600 billion yen, though, it remains industry to grow in the future, it will not be sufficient just to develop new robotics technologies; the creation of social framework that will permit such growth is also essential. As an example of this, take the issue of the safety of robots working within human society. At present, the area in which robots work must by law be partitioned off, and robots cannot work together with human. As a shared social foundation to enable robots and humans to work together, amendments need to be made to the law and new safety rules need to be drafted.