After reading the press releases for this batch of 24 research reports, although they vary widely in their forecasts, they almost all agree that most segments of the robotics industry are expected to grow at a double-digit pace at least through 2022.

According to AgFunder’s 2016 AgTech Investing Report (supported by The Robot Report’s own research), 2016 drone funding fell 64% from 2015 levels. Also, the type of companies getting funded were sensor, payload and analytics-based add-ons or service-providing companies rather than drone makers.

2016 was a banner year for acquisitions of companies involved in robotics and automation: 50 sold; 11 for amounts over $500 million; five were over a billion. 30 of the 50 companies disclosed transaction amounts which totaled up to a colossal $18.867 billion!

Sophisticated household robots are only just starting to show up in our lives, but all the building blocks for a veritable “Cambrian explosion” of robotics are there, as Gill Pratt described it when he was running the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge. The service robotics industry is emerging, and we will soon be seeing robots of all shapes and sizes making their first forays into our everyday lives.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Christina Brester, from the Siberian State Aerospace University, about her research on a method to identify emotional state from speech. This method performs speech analysis with a self-adaptive, multi-objective, genetic algorithm for feature selection and uses a neural network to classify those features. In this interview, we’ll discuss exactly what that means, as well as the implications and future of this research.

The definitive list of private funding in robotics–or at least the most widely cited is the Hizook VC Funding for Robotics list.  The list for 2012 is out.   Please help make it complete by adding a comment if you know of private funding for a robotics company that is not included.  I am certain that there are deals that are not included.

For the next week, Robohub will host a special focus on robots and jobs, featuring original articles from leading experts in the fields of robotics and automation. The goal of the series is to explore the shifting employment landscape as robots become more prevalent in the workplace, and we’ve got a great lineup!

These days it is hard to read an article about the future of robots that does not include a reference to jobs. As a pure roboticist I object to the constant connection between the two, but as a concerned citizen I think it is a very worthwhile discussion.  Since the year 2000, the US has lost more than 6 million manufacturing jobs — that is more than 1/3 of all direct manufacturing jobs in the US and the fastest drop in a single decade on record.

Do industrial robots really have a positive impact on employment? Of course they do and there are over 50 years of data proving that to be the case.

All the economics reports from a variety of stakeholders in one place! Don’t forget to bookmark this page – we will update it as new reports become available.