Global Predictions for Robotics in 2017

The ring­ing in of the New Year brings new mar­ket intel­li­gence and pre­dic­tions for robot­ics from the research con­duct­ed by the Inter­na­tion­al Data Cor­po­ra­tion (IDC). The IDC FutureScape doc­u­ment reflects a set of pre­dic­tions after review­ing the pre­vi­ous mar­ket and then esti­mates log­i­cal changes that are expect­ed in the mar­ket for the next 3 years. 

The research that IDC brings to the robot­ic world holds very excit­ing and promis­ing infor­ma­tion; it reas­sures the well known fact that the robot­ics world has grown con­sid­er­ably over the past sev­er­al years and will con­tin­ue to do so. The mar­ket is show­ing an esti­mat­ed 17% com­pound annu­al growth rate and a val­ue that will reach around $135 bil­lion by 2019. This is from the new indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, of sorts, that is span­ning the globe, build­ing up the promise of improv­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing process through dig­i­tal and automa­tion tech­nol­o­gy. It is not only the indus­tri­al envi­ron­ment that sees rock­et­ing robot sales, but also com­mer­cial ser­vices and appli­ca­tions out­side of the man­u­fac­tur­ing envi­ron­ment, such as hos­pi­tals, ful­fill­ment cen­ters, and even space. Even small man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies can also expect pos­i­tive changes as the tech­nol­o­gy and prices are mak­ing robot­ics no longer a tool just for large indus­tri­al process­es. The robot­ics mar­ket is quick­ly becom­ing more afford­able, eas­i­er to use, and less complex.

To help the IDC accu­rate­ly pre­dict the robot­ics mar­ket fore­casts, they looked at 6 areas: robot­ic sys­tems, after­mar­ket robot­ics hard­ware, ser­vices relat­ed to robot­ics, sys­tem hard­ware, and soft­ware. The fac­tors that are fuel­ing the growth for the robot­ics mar­ket con­sist of a mix­ture between mar­ket aware­ness and accep­tance and the quick­ly advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy and ulti­mate­ly, afford­abil­i­ty. Fur­ther­more, the invest­ments into the robot­ics mar­ket from Ven­ture Cap­i­tal and pri­vate equi­ty have become more sig­nif­i­cant. It was also found that mul­ti­ple non-tra­di­tion­al robot­ics com­pa­nies are com­pil­ing ideas and work areas for robots and robot­ic software.

Technology’s rapid advance­ments, such as the Inter­net of Things, are also help­ing the robot­ics mar­ket progress at a fast pace. The IoT helps tie every­thing togeth­er through advanced sen­sors and net­work­ing and pro­duces capa­bil­i­ties to cap­ture, share, and act on real-time data that is con­stant­ly being gen­er­at­ed and imme­di­ate­ly avail­able. Over­all, all of these traits com­bine, with the addi­tion­al options of A.I. and cog­ni­tive com­put­ing, to pro­duce an incred­i­bly effi­cient system.

The above data and thought process­es have cre­at­ed two camps for peo­ple in the world today; (1) robots are job mak­ers and (2) robots are job tak­ers. After fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion from the IDC, pre­dic­tions were made in two sim­i­lar areas to the areas above; one being the tal­ent race in the field of robot­ics and the oth­er was the poten­tial for gov­ern­ment intervention. 

(1) Ris­ing tech­nolo­gies are able to cre­ate new jobs and new skills that are nec­es­sary to fill those jobs that emerge as new tech­nol­o­gy becomes more wide­ly adopt­ed. There will be a demand for peo­ple with these skills in order to prop­er­ly main­tain, build, devel­op, deploy, man­age, and ser­vice robots for the years to come. Over­all, the IDC said that there is great poten­tial for robot­ics to be a job mak­er with these nec­es­sary new skills across a wide range of areas. Addi­tion­al­ly, the report pre­dicts that future years will cre­ate a larg­er tal­ent gap around robot­ics skills. and ​“by 2020, robot­ics growth will accel­er­ate the tal­ent race, leav­ing 35% of robot­ics relat­ed jobs vacant while the aver­age salary increas­es by at least 60%.”

(2) In regards to the poten­tial for gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion, the IDC thinks that ​“by 2019, gov­ern­ments will begin imple­ment­ing robot­ics-spe­cif­ic reg­u­la­tions to pre­serve jobs and to address con­cerns of secu­ri­ty, safe­ty, and pri­va­cy.” This is to incen­tivize the use of human labor in order to main­tain jobs. The IDC pur­pose­ful­ly left the pre­dic­tion slight­ly vague because at the inter­sec­tion of gov­ern­ments, busi­ness, tech­nol­o­gy, and soci­ety there are still a mul­ti­tude of chal­lenges to tackle. 

Over­all, it can­not go unno­ticed that robots are mak­ing a big move into our every­day life, whether it is large busi­ness or small ones, they are help­ing to increase the lev­el of automa­tion and bet­ter dri­ve effi­cien­cies. The robot­ics mar­ket is tru­ly advanc­ing at rapid lev­els, in pret­ty much every cor­ner possible.

Robots​.com is proud to be along for the ride as tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ues to devel­op and reshape the way the world con­quers automa­tion man­u­fac­tur­ing at all lev­els. For any ques­tions about automa­tion, please feel free to con­tact our team of experts at Robots​.com. We are ready to pro­vide you with more infor­ma­tion, con­tact us online or at 877−762−6881 today!

Infor­ma­tion source: All data for this arti­cle was obtained from Robot­ics Tomor­row.