How many robots are there in the world?

The figure that is actually measured is the industrial one: the IFR counts the operational stock in factories, and its latest World Robotics report puts it above 4.28 million units, with more than half a million new robots installed per year. The distribution is the interesting part: China holds 1.8 million, the only country in the world with such a stock, and installs more robots per year than the rest of the planet combined.

Outside the factory, the census falls apart. Professional service robots (warehouse AMRs, server robots, surgical systems) and domestic ones (vacuums, mowers) sell by the millions and nobody keeps a global count of the active fleet. It is a pattern that repeats at every scale: as we tell in our waiters-and-robots report, even Spain doesn't know how many server robots it has. The honest answer to this question is a record number with an asterisk: we only know how to count the robots that work under an industrial roof.