The labor shortage will inevitably force China to upgrade its most modern factories, including investments in robotics, or face looking manufacturing to inland states and foreign competition.

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However, he warned against focussing disproportionately on the eight areas of excellence outlined by the Chancellor in November ("big data" computing, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agricultural science, energy storage, space, robotics and advanced materials including nanotechnology).

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The Amazon executive has been busy as a startup investor for several years now and his Bezos Expeditions investment fund has collected at least 14 startups to date, including Twitter, Pelago and Heartland Robotics, among others, records show.

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In his speech, Mr Osborne set out seven further areas where the government thinks Britain is a world leader and can and must go further: computing, synthetic biology, regenerative medicine, agricultural science, energy storage, robotics and advanced materials including nanotechnology.

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Robotics: Six presenting firms offer robotic and software systems to maximize yield and productivity including Energid Technologies that has developed a robotic citrus harvesting system that automatically finds and removes fruit at a lower cost than manual harvesting, and Vision Robotics that will use stereo vision-based robots to pick, prune and other tasks on specialty crops.

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Double Robotics says it has around 600 units in pre-orders from 44 countries around the world including universities and a handful of Fortune 500 companies.

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