Robotics Use Cases

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

The robotics market continues to experience a profound and significant restructuring as the traditional industrial robotics sector continues to shrink as an overall percentage of the total robotics industry.

According to Tractica's estimates, non-industrial robots represented 70% of the $39.3 billion robotics market globally in 2017, growing from a 64% share in 2016. Most of this growth is being driven by new and expanding use cases in segments like agriculture, autonomous vehicles, consumer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), warehousing, logistics, military and personal robotics, and personal assistant robots.

The epicenter of robotics continues to shift from the traditional centers of Japan and Europe toward the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) hotbeds of Silicon Valley and China.

The key trend emerging in the industry is that AI technologies like deep learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) are revolutionizing autonomy and UI/UX capabilities in robots. This is driving many of the most significant advancements in robotics, and making possible numerous new commercial and personal robotics use cases. The result is that the number of non-industrial robots for professional and consumer use cases is expected to more than double in the next 5 years.

The opportunity for robotics spans a wide range of industries and geographies and is particularly disruptive in activities that involve repetitive work from transportation to logistics to surgery to cooking cuisine. This growth trend will accelerate further when autonomous vehicles take to the streets, resulting in a dramatic expansion in global robotics market revenues over the next 10 years.