THE ROBOTICS MARKET REPORT: The fast-multiplying opportunities in consumer, industrial, and office robots

Robots have been a reality on factory assembly lines for over twenty years. But it is only relatively recently that robots have become advanced enough to penetrate into home and office settings.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence we assess the market for consumer and office robots, taking a close look at how robots are penetrating into many markets once dominated by legacy consumer-electronics companies.

We also examine the market for industrial manufacturing robots since it is the market where many robotics companies got their start, and remains the largest robot market by revenue. We assess how far along the robotics industry has come in solving some of the most pressing hardware and software challenges. And finally, we assess the factors on the consumer side that might still limit the market for relatively inexpensive home robots.

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Here are some of the most important takeaways from the report:

• This is a surging market: The multibillion-dollar global market for robotics, long dominated by industrial and logistics uses, has begun to see a shift toward new consumer and office applications. There will be a $1.5 billion market for consumer and business robots by 2019.
• The consumer-robot market is the fastest growing. The market for consumer and office robots will grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2014 and 2019, seven times faster than the market for manufacturing robots.
• There are three dominant categories on the consumer/office side: The consumer/office robot market is currently led by three distinct categories: home cleaning and maintenance, "telepresence" (i.e., telecommuting to events or remote offices), and advanced robots for home entertainment.Other applications, such as robots that assist people with handicaps, are still nascent.
• The rise of mobile has fueled the push into robotics: The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets has made it easier to develop robots for consumer and office applications. Mobile devices offer designers the opportunity to "outsource" computing and user interface tasks to companion devices, allowing developers to produce app-controlled robots at more accessible price points.
• Would-be robot vendors still face some major obstacles: one is the well-studied revulsion that most people feel toward robots that are too humanoid in appearance, and another is the high price demanded for key technologies that power robot mobility and object manipulation. There is also a brewing potential for the kinds of intellectual property battles we've seen in the smartphone space.

In full, the report:

• Includes nine charts and datasets on robot industry segmentation, opportunities, and trends
• Has nine separate sections with in-depth discussions of tech and price hurdles, barriers to consumer adoption, industrial market shifts, Google's robotics efforts, toy robots, the telepresence market, the home-cleaning market, and the consumer-robot market overall.
• Discusses why growth in industrial robots has tapered.
• Details the reasons behind the success of the Roomba vacuum.
• Introduces geographically segmented data on the home-cleaning market.

For full access to the report on robots and all BI Intelligence's coverage of the internet of things, mobile, payments, e-commerce, and digital media industries, sign up for a risk-free trial.