Ten scientific questions on the frontiers of high-end manufacturing for this year were released on Tuesday at a conference in Beijing organized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), hoping to inspire scientists to overcome frontiers and advance high-end manufacturing.

The scientific questions were jointly announced during the 5th Yanqi Lake Conference, which was held this year. Experts involved include those from China, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Japan, and Singapore.

The CAS said the questions were collected from experts around the world, and were then carefully reviewed before making the shortlist. Finally, they were refined from over 100 candidate questions.

They cover various fields in the sector, particularly laser manufacturing, micro-and-nano-manufacturing, and robotized intelligent manufacturing.

These are the 10 scientific questions raised for this year:

1. How to achieve controllable manufacturing at the atomic scale?

2. How does robotized manufacturing impact the future manufacturing paradigm?

3. How to precisely control geometry and performance in high-energy-beam additive manufacturing?

4. How to generate new matter and materials based on arbitrary elements and structures?

5. How to realize human-like skills in robotic operations?

6. What are the mechanisms and effects of energy-carrier spatio-temporal evolution during extreme-light-field manufacturing?

7. How to achieve heterogeneous cross-scale manufacturing?

8. How to achieve performance-driven high-value added manufacturing?

9. How to realize simultaneously high efficiency and high performance in multi-scale laser manufacturing?

10. How to realize future manufacturing robot systems?

The CAS said the Yanqi Lake Conference analyzes issues at the frontiers of science, facilitates interdisciplinary and international academic exchanges, and will continue to provide scientific support and strategic consultations.