What Is Robotics?

What a robot is

A robot is a machine that is programmed, moved by its own motors, and able to sense its surroundings or its own state, so that it can move itself, handle objects or position them with some degree of autonomy — without a person steering every movement. Three things set it apart from other machines:

• It is programmable. The same robot arm can weld today and stack boxes tomorrow after a new program; a bottling machine does one job for life.
• It moves in more than one way. Several joints or wheels, each driven by a motor (an actuator), combine into motion in space.
• It reacts to what it senses. Even the simplest industrial arm measures the position of every joint many times a second; a mobile robot also measures the world around it.

The formal vocabulary of the field is set by the standard ISO 8373 ("Robotics — Vocabulary"). Its current edition dates from 2021, and ISO expects to replace it with a revision soon (as of October 2026). Definitions in standards are careful about edge cases; for this topic, the description above is enough.

Robotics is the field that designs, builds and programs robots. It draws on mechanics, electronics, control theory, computer science and, more and more, AI — which is why this topic links to the IoT, OT, Math for IT and AI topics so often.

Sense, think, act

Every robot, from a vacuum cleaner to a car-factory welder, runs the same loop many times a second: it senses, decides and acts, and what it does changes what it senses next. The pages of this topic follow that loop.

• Sense: measure the robot itself (joint angles, wheel turns, motor current) and the world (distances, images, forces) — see Sensors for Robots.
• Think: work out where the robot and its tool are (Coordinate Frames and Transforms, Kinematics, Localization and Mapping), and decide where to go (Path Planning).
• Act: drive the motors so the robot really follows the plan (Motors and Drives, Motion Control and PID).

The loop is a control loop in the sense of the OT topic, with one difference in pace: a robot joint is corrected many times per second, because a moving arm covers centimeters in a fraction of a second.

Where the word comes from

The word "robot" was born on the stage. The Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920; it was published in November 1920 and first performed in January 1921 (an amateur company in Hradec Králové staged it on 2 January; Prague's National Theatre on 25 January). An English translation followed in 1923, and the word spread with the play.

Two details are often told wrong:

• The word came from his brother. Karel had thought of calling his creatures "labori"; his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, suggested "roboti". It comes from the Czech robota, the forced labor that serfs owed their lord.
• Čapek's robots were not machines. They were artificial biological beings — in the play, old Rossum tried "to imitate the living matter known as protoplasm" (Paul Selver's 1923 English translation). Today we would call them androids. The metal robot came later, from film and science fiction.

Asimov and the Three Laws

The word "robotics" came from fiction too. Isaac Asimov is generally credited with coining it in his robot stories of the early 1940s, and his Three Laws of Robotics — a robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, let one come to harm; must obey orders; and must protect itself, in that order of priority — are usually dated to his 1942 story "Runaround". Many of his stories are about the ways these laws go wrong.

The first industrial robots

The industrial robot began with an American inventor, George C. Devol, Jr. He filed a patent for "Programmed Article Transfer" on 10 December 1954; it was granted on 13 June 1961 as US 2,988,237. The idea was a machine that could be taught a sequence of movements and repeat it. Together with the entrepreneur Joseph Engelberger — often called the father of robotics — he turned it into the Unimate, sold by the company Unimation.

According to the record of The Henry Ford museum, the first Unimate "unloaded a die-casting press at the General Motors Ternstedt Division plant in Trenton, New Jersey in 1961". It is a telling first job: hot, heavy, repetitive and dangerous — the kind of work robots still take over first. Some sources give 1959 instead; the museum's 1961 is the safer date.

Shakey: the first robot that planned

Unimate repeated what it was taught. Shakey, built at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) between 1966 and 1972, was a robot that could perceive its surroundings, reason about them and plan its own actions to reach a goal. In 2017 the IEEE dedicated a Milestone to it as "the world's first mobile intelligent robot".

Shakey's lasting gift is software. The project produced the A* search algorithm, still the standard way to find a shortest route on a map (see Path Planning), a refinement of the Hough transform for finding lines in images, and STRIPS, an early and influential automated planner.

Kinds of robots

Robots are grouped by where they work and how they move. The groups overlap — a mobile robot with an arm on top is both — but the names are used everywhere, including in the statistics further down.

Industrial robots

An industrial robot is a programmable robot used in manufacturing, almost always a fixed arm with several joints (usually six) that welds, paints, assembles, handles parts or tends machines. It works inside a robot cell with guards and safety sensors, because it is fast and strong enough to injure anyone in reach. The parts of such an arm are on Anatomy of a Robot, and daily practice on Industrial Robots and Cobots in Practice.

Collaborative robots

A collaborative robot, or "cobot", is the market name for a robot arm designed to work near people: lighter, slower, with rounded shapes, and with safety functions that limit force and speed. Cobots are easier to set up than classic industrial arms, often by guiding the arm by hand.

The name is convenient but not what the safety standard uses. Since the 2025 editions of ISO 10218, the standard no longer speaks of a "collaborative robot": only the application — the robot, its tool, the part and the task together — can be collaborative. A "cobot" holding a knife is not safe to stand next to. The details are on Robot Safety and Standards.

Mobile robots

Mobile robots move themselves rather than an arm. In factories and warehouses there are two kinds:

• An automated guided vehicle (AGV) follows fixed paths — a painted line, a magnetic tape, markers on the floor — and stops when something blocks the way.
• An autonomous mobile robot (AMR) navigates on its own: it builds or uses a map, knows where it is on it, and plans a new route around an obstacle.

Both are covered by the safety standard for driverless industrial trucks, ISO 3691-4:2023, whose scope names them explicitly. How a mobile robot knows where it is, and how it finds its way, is the subject of Mobile Robots and Odometry, Localization and Mapping and Path Planning. Drones — flying mobile robots — inspect power lines and buildings; they appear on Robots at Work.

Service robots

A service robot is a robot that does useful work for people or equipment outside industrial manufacturing. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) splits them into two groups:

• Professional service robots: transport and logistics robots in warehouses and hospitals, surgical robots, cleaning and inspection robots, milking robots on farms.
• Consumer robots: robot vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, window cleaners and toys.

Humanoid robots

A humanoid robot has a roughly human body plan — a torso, two arms, usually two legs and a head — so that it can work in spaces built for people and use people's tools. Humanoids attract most of the attention and much of the investment, but they are still early: the IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids (taller than 140 cm) sold worldwide in 2025, against more than 600,000 industrial robots. Which humanoids are really at work and which are demonstrations is sorted out, with dates, on AI in Robotics.

How many robots are there?

The International Federation of Robotics publishes the standard statistics every autumn in its World Robotics report. The 2026 edition (released 24 September 2026, data for 2025) reports, as of October 2026:

• 603,307 industrial robots installed in 2025 (+11%), a new record — the previous one was 552,946 in 2022.
• 5,079,078 industrial robots in operation (+9%), the "operational stock".
• A market value of US$18.6 billion (+11%).
• A forecast of 655,000 installations in 2026 and 806,000 in 2029; the stock is expected to pass 6 million in 2028.

The example works out each region's and country's share of the 2025 installations, from the IFR's figures:

# IFR World Robotics 2026: industrial robots installed in 2025.
total = 603_307

by_region = {"Asia": 457_315, "Europe": 73_054, "Americas": 57_044}
by_country = {"China": 354_226, "United States": 38_428, "Japan": 36_200}

for name, units in by_region.items():
    print(f"{name:13} {units:8,}  {units / total:6.1%}")
print()
for name, units in by_country.items():
    print(f"{name:13} {units:8,}  {units / total:6.1%}")

# The IFR's forecast for 2026, compared with 2025:
forecast_2026 = 655_000
print(f"\nforecast 2026: {forecast_2026:,} ({forecast_2026 / total - 1:+.1%})")

Asia           457,315   75.8%
Europe          73,054   12.1%
Americas        57,044    9.5%

China          354,226   58.7%
United States   38,428    6.4%
Japan           36,200    6.0%

forecast 2026: 655,000 (+8.6%)

China installed 354,226 robots (+20%), 59% of the world total, and Chinese suppliers delivered 55% of them. The United States, with 38,428, overtook Japan (36,200). Europe's installations fell by 14%. By industry, electronics (142,235) was the largest customer, ahead of automotive (138,429) and metal and machinery (108,571).

Industrial robots are only part of the picture. In a separate release (30 September 2026) the IFR counted almost 250,000 professional service robots sold in 2025 (+24%) — 117,500 of them for transport and logistics and 8,400 surgical robots — and almost 34.2 million consumer robots.

Robot density

Absolute numbers favor big countries. To compare how automated manufacturing is, the IFR divides the number of industrial robots by the number of manufacturing employees: robot density, in robots per 10,000 employees. The figures below are for 2024, published in April 2026:

# Robot density: industrial robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees
# (IFR, 2024 data, published April 2026).
density = {
    "Korea": 1_220,
    "Germany": 449,
    "Japan": 446,
    "United States": 307,
    "China": 166,
    "World average": 132,
}

for place, robots in density.items():
    employees_per_robot = 10_000 / robots
    print(f"{place:14} {robots:5,} robots  -> one per {employees_per_robot:5.1f} employees")

Korea          1,220 robots  -> one per   8.2 employees
Germany          449 robots  -> one per  22.3 employees
Japan            446 robots  -> one per  22.4 employees
United States    307 robots  -> one per  32.6 employees
China            166 robots  -> one per  60.2 employees
World average    132 robots  -> one per  75.8 employees

Korea has one robot for roughly every eight manufacturing employees. Singapore (818) comes second.

Common misconceptions

• "Robots think like people." Nearly all robots in use follow programs written and tested by engineers. Even AI-driven robots learn narrow skills; see Limits and Myths of AI.
• "Humanoids are everywhere." About 7,000 full-size humanoids were sold in 2025, against hundreds of thousands of industrial and service robots (IFR, as of October 2026).
• "A cobot is safe by definition." Safety belongs to the whole application, not to the arm; a risk assessment decides.
• "Robots are a factory thing." Warehouses, hospitals, farms, substations and homes all use them — see Robots at Work.