A Pakistani robotics firm has called for joint laboratories and joint ventures with Chinese partners to help the country start making industrial robots at home.
Robionix Technologies, founded by Dr Awais Yasin, has built an AI-based inspection system that checks whether a finished garment matches the buyer’s order. The system is already running at textile factories in Karachi, Faisalabad and Sialkot. In a recent installation, only three major parts were imported — the camera, the touchscreen and its mount. Everything else, including the assembly work, was done in Pakistan.
Building a full industrial robot arm is a different matter. Yasin said Pakistan has no local suppliers for the precision motors, gears and drives such machines need, which is why a fully local six-axis robot remains out of reach.
“The robot itself is not the biggest problem,” he said. “The missing ecosystem around the robot is the bigger challenge.”
Yasin, who did his robotics PhD in Beijing and now teaches at the National University of Technology in Islamabad, said cooperation should begin with local assembly and integration and move towards making the critical parts in Pakistan, with Pakistani engineers trained alongside Chinese ones.
Textiles earned Pakistan $17.88 billion in the last fiscal year, around 56% of merchandise exports.
