Besides incentives offered in investment, land prices, talent attraction, and research and development, Shanghai also will try to encourage factories to increase the use of high-tech robotics.

The steel, automobile, machinery, shipbuilding, pharmaceutical, electronics and food industries will be the target sectors for robotics applications, Wu said, adding that large State-owned enterprises will take the lead.

Wang Tianmiao, head of the expert panel on robot technology under the State High-Tech Development Plan, said the country will be short 300,000 to 500,000 units of industrial robots until at least 2020.

The International Federation of Robotics estimates that China will become the world's largest robotics market by 2015, accounting for 16.9 percent of the global total.

Over the next two years, revenue in the robotics market may reach 1 trillion yuan in China, the organization estimated.

"Foreign companies have obvious advantages in the Chinese market," Wang said.

He said the reliability of domestically made robots is generally less than those of foreign competitors: The duration time of foreign robots is 50,000 to 80,000 hours, while Chinese robots can last only 8,000 hours.

According to Xu Fang, head of research for Shenyang-based Siasun Robot, the largest domestic robotics manufacturer by sales, domestic companies account for only 8 percent of the Chinese market.

Eventually, however, there will be more outstanding Chinese robot manufacturers, "just as we have seen in the home appliance and machinery sectors", Wang said.