Washington, US: Rapid advances in robotics combined with falling prices will spark a new manufacturing revolution, with factories dropping workers for automation at an increasing pace, a new study said Tuesday.

The pace of price falls and improved abilities of advanced robots to ‘see’ better, grip better and self-adjust better make them an attractive option for even small manufacturers across an ever-wider range of industries, said the study by Boston Consulting Group.

The big beneficiaries of these advances are expected to be more agile manufacturers in the United States, China, Germany, Japan and South Korea, which are expected to quickly accelerate spending on robotics over the next decade, BCG said.

Left behind will be countries like France, Italy and Belgium, ‘largely because of inflexible labour laws that make it difficult to replace workers through automation,’ BCG said.

The study said the prices of advanced industrial robots -- automatically controlled, reprogrammable industrial machines that work on three or more axes -- will fall around 20% over the next 10 years.

Meanwhile their contribution to productivity should improve by about five percent a year, making them increasingly attractive even to manufacturers in medium-wage environments.

For a country like South Korea, the savings on labor was estimated at 33%. For other leading economies like the United States, Germany, and Japan, the savings were at 20-25%.

And for global export powerhouse China, its stunning revival over the past two decades rooted in cheap labor but now challenged by rising wages, the savings from advanced robots will be about 18 percent, according to the BCG study.

Robots have long been used in manufacturing, for instance in the auto industry, where often they do one repeated action, with little movement involved.

Advanced robots have not only the advantages of being programmable and to operate on multiple axes, but also can develop and apply logic -- automatically adjusting to different situations like varied-sized materials -- to perform tasks.