Evolution of the EU market share of robotics: Data and Methodology

One of the objectives of the AI WATCH is to calculate the EU robotics market shares over the past ten years. To this end, this report, first, provides a review of the robotics industry, and looks at the official definitions of both industrial and services robots. Second, the report offers a review of the scientific and institutional literature looking at the economic impact of robotics. Third, it describes the different statistical data sources, identified through a comprehensive search, offering relevant information about the robotics industry. Fourth, it provides an initial overview of the European robotics market shares from the different data sources identified. The identification of existing robotics data sources will contribute to the construction of a methodology to assess the EU shares concerning adoption and production of robots. The main objective is to establish the basis for a suitable database that will allow tracing the evolution of EU shares in the global robotics market over the past ten years, ideally disentangling between industrial and service robots. This report sketches such methodology, while it also identifies the main data gaps and challenges to integrating the heterogeneous information from different data sources into a coherent database, in order to derive consistent estimates of the EU market share in robotics. Such methodology will have to account for data challenges (e.g., missing data, development of sound merging techniques) so that the EU trends of robotics can be assessed along the most important dimensions (i.e. demand vs supply, industrial vs service robots), and aiming to provide relevant information to the policies of the European Commission for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.