Abstract: Intelligent robots are increasingly and profoundly influencing human production, life, and innovation paradigms, becoming the core area for countries to strive for new advantages in the future. The new technological revolution has opened a window of opportunity for late-coming economies to catch up with the intelligent robot technology. China has actively responded and proposed a new catch-up strategy of transforming technological innovation towards parallel and leading advancements. To effectively implement the new catch-up strategy, an important prerequisite is to scientifically measure and dynamically track the technological gap between the main competitors in the field of intelligent robots, so as to optimize the innovation routes and overcome the “medium technology trap”. The statistical measurement results based on the intellectual property data such as paper influence and patent influence show that the gap in intelligent robot technology between China and the United States, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea has converged to a narrow range of 10%, with overtaking and anti-overtaking repeatedly shifting positions, presenting the typical characteristics of the parallel running stages. China has overwhelming advantages in the total number of papers, highly cited papers, and the number of patents. But on the whole, China has more patent applications and fewer authorizations. The domestic and international layout structure of China’s patents lack international competitiveness. China’s top ten institutions for intelligent robot patents in the world are all universities, lacking leading enterprises that can compete with the four leading international families. The key and core technologies, software, hardware, and operating systems are still subject to the control of other countries.

Key words: intelligent robots, technology gap, opportunity window, intellectual property, innovation leap