BEIJING - The industry scale of China's domestically made robots has seen 20 percent annual growth in five years, People's Daily reported Monday.

According to the China Robot Industry Alliance (CRIA), 131,000 industrial robots were domestically made in 2017.

By the end of 2017, there were more than 6,500 enterprises engaged in robot production.

China also has employed the largest amount of industrial robots since 2013, said CRIA.

The market shares of domestically made industrial robots fell for the first time in five years, shrinking to below 27 percent in 2017.

With the development and integration of information technology and artificial intelligence (AI), robots could be used both in the manufacturing industry and people's daily lives, president of Siasun Robot Qu Daokui told the newspaper.

With the assistance of AI, robots would be able to cooperate and coordinate with people in the future, said the newspaper.

Wen Zhongmeng, president of Asage Robots, said visual and audio technologies could make robots useful in the education and medical industries.