Cai Hegao, 91, is a founding father of China’s robotics industry and the oldest person on this list. In the mid 1980s, he developed China’s first industrial robots capable of welding. Cai is currently the honorary director of the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and…
…Systems at the Harbin Institute of Technology, where he previously directed the school’s robotics institute. HIT is now one of the leading schools for robotics studies in China, and has been on the U.S. Entity List since 2020.
