Bergur Thormundsson
Research expert covering technology in the Nordics, AI and smart cities
While specialist robots might suggest something out of Star Wars, in reality it is a large segment of the robotics market, covering a wide variety of specialist tasks. The robotics industry is large, expecting to draw in a revenue of over 37 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. This large market has naturally begun to move into specializations, from home robots to collaborative robots to industrial robots. All have their place and specialist robots straddle the line between these groups as they are used in every industry.
Growing food and aiding the sick
Among the specialist robot markets are a few that are becoming ever more important. A great example is the agricultural robot market. Mechanization is not new to agriculture but now it has begun to shift out workers on a new scale. The agricultural robot market is large and growing, expecting to reach eight billion U.S. dollars in 2023 and climbing to more than thrice that by the end of the decade. Healthcare robots are a similarly impressive market. Indeed, as the population ages all over the world, it is heading for a considerable growth trajectory. The expectation is that the hospital robotics market will ship nearly seven thousand units in 2023, a number expected to grow fivefold by 2030.Space age robotics have arrived
Despite the dismissal of the Star Wars imagery mentioned before, space robots are indeed a market of considerable size. These are highly specialized robots designed to clear out debris in space, repair satellites, or in other ways assist with projects in orbit and further into the void of space. This market is not as large as other robot markets, but it is also growing quickly. More and more human action in space requires assistance as the work environment is particularly hostile to living beings. And as the number of active satellites has grown astronomically since the turn of the century, this field is unlikely to decrease in importance.
