Pu Li (left) , vice president of Ninebot Inc, and Sarah Zhang, senior director and head of Robotics Business Operations of Ninebot, speak to media during a press conference held in January 19, 2017 in Beijing. （Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn）
Pu Li, vice president of Ninebot Inc, mentioned that Ninebot provides an open platform and has unveiled a software developer kit (SDK) for developers to write their own applications for the new robot.
According to the company, the developers' project started in 2016 and has received thousands of applications from around the world for applying the authorization of development for Segway Robots.
Short-listed candidates chosen by the company will be qualified to purchase the developer version of the robot and receive technology support from Ninebot.
Pu noted that currently 70 percent of the registrations that come from developers, who are aiming to implement robot services, focus on industries such as general public services, medical care for elders, remote collaboration, games and entertainment, education and R&D on artificial intelligence.
"Speaking of business models, we want to accomplish a win-win beneficial success with third-party developers through application R&D and business cooperation," according to a written statement of the Ninebot Inc.
From February 10 to 12, the company will be a robotic platform sponsor of a healthcare robotics hackathon in Singapore.
The event will be hosted by MIT Hacking Medicine, originally a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student-run group that brings together innovative thinkers to solve healthcare's most pervasive problems.
Segway Robot will provide 5 Alpha robots for the teams who participate to the event.
Zhuang Yongjun, chief technology officer at Qihan Technology Co Ltd, a Shenzhen-based company focused on robotics innovation, artificial intelligence and video analysis technologies, said: "Medical assistant robots, elderly-care robots and education assistant robots will be some of the core segment markets in the future."
According to Xinhua News Agency, China's service robotics has been leading the world in firefighting, disaster relief, health care and catering.
In April last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology unveiled an ambitious plan to sell more than 30 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) worth of domestic service robots by 2020, to meet the demand from healthcare, education, entertainment, medical and defense industries.
Latest statistics from the International Federation of Robotics show that an estimated 94,800 professional service robots will be installed between 2013 and 2018 across the world, with total sales of $17.1 billion. Medical and military robots accounted for 55 percent of the total sales.
