Global robotics technology roadmap

Deborah Lupton / Pop Chips / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Henrik I Christensen, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at University of California San Diego, has recently released a global robotics technology roadmap. This position paper focuses on Asia, Europe, and America and outlines the current state-of-the-art in robotics, and highlights the main opportunities.

The roadmap draws on robotics research and industry data to identify a global technology trajectory for the decade 2025–2035. It integrates findings from leading robotics conferences (such as ICRA, IROS, RSS, CoRL), machine-learning venues (including NeurIPS, ICML), and journal publications, combined with market intelligence from trade organizations and regional government strategies. The document is structured for use by policymakers, technology strategists, research agencies, and industrial research and development leaders. It is based on a review of present research, industry statistics and numerous visits by Henrik to research labs across three continents.

Key headline findings of this roadmap are:

• The global robotics market reached $53.2B in 2024 and is on a trajectory to $178.7B by 2033.
• Asia dominates industrial deployment (74% of global installations in 2024; China alone 54%), while Europe leads in safety-critical regulation and collaborative cobots, and the United States leads in AI-powered autonomy and defense robotics.
• Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are the most consequential algorithmic development of the current period, enabling cross-embodiment generalization for the first time.
• Soft robotics and compliant mechanisms, enabled by liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), electroactive polymers (EAPs), and self-healing hydrogels, are bridging the gap between rigid industrial systems and bio-compatible medical devices.
• The humanoid robot segment, currently $370M in 2025, is projected to reach $6.5B by 2030 , with Chinese original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and US technology companies racing to scale production.
• Regulatory asymmetry is a critical geopolitical variable: the EU AI Act, the first comprehensive legal framework for high-risk AI systems, is reshaping humanoid robot design globally.

The 52-page comprehensive document covers the following sub-topics:

Introduction and scope. Motivation and methodology. Global market baseline. State of the art: academic research landscape. Embodied AI, foundation models, reinforcement learning, navigation, manipulation and sensing, bio-inspired locomotion, multi-robot systems, and human-robot collaboration. Enabling technologies: cross-cutting advances. Materials science and soft robotics, computing infrastructure, perception and sensing. Regional technology strategies. Europe, Asia, USA. Technology roadmap 2025–2035. Algorithms and AI, hardware and actuation, materials and manufacturing, and systems, safety and deployment. Sector-specific analysis, observations, and recommendations. Manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, agriculture, mining, construction, service robots. Cross-cutting strategic themes. The humanoid convergence race, sustainability, workforce and societal impacts, geopolitical technology risks. Recommended research priorities by region. Covering Europe, USA and Asia.