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Annual professional service robots installed globally, by application area

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Artificial Intelligence

What you should know about this indicator

  • Agriculture category includes robots used for tasks such as plowing, seeding, harvesting, weeding, fertilizing, and pesticide spraying—both indoors (e.g. greenhouses) and outdoors (e.g. fields and vineyards). It also covers robots for milking, as well as those used in other livestock activities like feeding and barn cleaning.
  • Professional cleaning category includes robots designed to clean floors, windows, walls, tanks, pipes, and vehicle hulls in professional environments. This category also includes disinfection robots and others used for specialized or large-scale cleaning tasks.
  • Transportation and logistics category includes robots that transport goods and manage inventory in both indoor and outdoor environments. These robots are used in places such as warehouses, hospitals, hotels, and public streets, and they support activities like deliveries, stock counting, and restocking.
  • Medical and health care category includes robots used in clinical and care settings for diagnostics, surgery, rehabilitation, and non-invasive therapy. It also includes hospital support robots, wearable exoskeletons, and telepresence robots used specifically in healthcare.
  • Hospitality category includes robots that prepare and serve food or drinks, as well as those that provide information, guidance, or remote presence in customer-facing environments like hotels, restaurants, and museums.
Annual professional service robots installed globally, by application area
Professional service robots are semi- or fully autonomous machines that perform useful tasks in a professional setting outside of industrial applications, such as in cleaning or medical surgery. Consumer service robots are not included.
Source
International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report (2025); International Federation of Robotics via AI Index (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 8, 2025
Next expected update
April 2026
Date range
2021–2023
Unit
robots

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report – AI Index Report

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
April 8, 2025
Retrieved from
https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HAI_2024_AI-Index-Report.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Yolanda Gil, Vanessa Parli, Njenga Kariuki, Emily Capstick, Anka Reuel, Erik
Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald,
Tobi Walsh, Armin Hamrah, Lapo Santarlasci, Julia Betts Lotufo, Alexandra Rome, Andrew Shi, Sukrut Oak. “The AI Index 2025
Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2025

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
April 8, 2025
Retrieved from
https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HAI_2024_AI-Index-Report.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Yolanda Gil, Vanessa Parli, Njenga Kariuki, Emily Capstick, Anka Reuel, Erik
Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald,
Tobi Walsh, Armin Hamrah, Lapo Santarlasci, Julia Betts Lotufo, Alexandra Rome, Andrew Shi, Sukrut Oak. “The AI Index 2025
Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2025

International Federation of Robotics via AI Index – AI Index Report

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
June 28, 2024
Retrieved from
https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HAI_2024_AI-Index-Report.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Vanessa Parli, Anka Reuel, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald, and Jack Clark, “The AI Index 2024 Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2024.

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). The mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data to enable policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.

Retrieved on
June 28, 2024
Retrieved from
https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HAI_2024_AI-Index-Report.pdf
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Raymond Perrault, Vanessa Parli, Anka Reuel, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Juan Carlos Niebles, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald, and Jack Clark, “The AI Index 2024 Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2024.

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“Data Page: Annual professional service robots installed globally, by application area”, part of the following publication: Charlie Giattino, Edouard Mathieu, Veronika Samborska, and Max Roser (2023) - “Artificial Intelligence”. Data adapted from International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report, International Federation of Robotics via AI Index. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report (2025); International Federation of Robotics via AI Index (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report (2025); International Federation of Robotics via AI Index (2024) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Annual professional service robots installed globally, by application area” [dataset]. International Federation of Robotics (IFR) via AI Index Report, “AI Index Report”; International Federation of Robotics via AI Index, “AI Index Report” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-professional-service-robots-installed-by-area.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear