Robotics – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2018 and 2023, researchers published roughly

220,000

English-language articles on robotics

The global robotics literature grew

44%

between 2018 and 2023

Articles on robotics made up

14%

of all articles on artificial intelligence

Authors from private companies contributed to

of robotics articles

What counts as "robotics" research?•How precise are these numbers?•What are the other caveats?

Explore relevant research in the Map of Science

Data last updated October 13, 2025

Vital signs

221,367
robotics articles were released between 2018 and 2023 (estd.)
44%
growth in research between 2018 and 2023
14%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on robotics

Citation impact

13
citations for the average robotics article
20
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

16%
of robotics articles have American authors
24%
have Chinese authors
21%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2018-2023)	Growth (2018-2023)	Global share	Citations per article
China	52,779	139%	24%	13.2
United States	36,103	23%	16%	22.8
Japan	16,481	-7%	7%	7.1

Top-cited articles

PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds
2018: arXiv. 4,354 citations
ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual–Inertial, and Multimap SLAM
2020: IEEE Transactions on robotics. 3,688 citations
Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset
2019: arXiv. 3,580 citations
Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications
2018: arXiv. 2,844 citations
Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks
2018: arXiv. 2,391 citations
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
2020: arXiv. 2,213 citations
SemanticKITTI: A Dataset for Semantic Scene Understanding of LiDAR Sequences
2019: arXiv. 2,198 citations
Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances
2022: arXiv. 2,112 citations
Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation
2018: arXiv. 2,061 citations
LeGO-LOAM: Lightweight and Ground-Optimized Lidar Odometry and Mapping on Variable Terrain
2018: Intelligent Robots and Systems. 2,059 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of robotics research (by article count)

#1 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#2 Harbin Institute of Technology (China)
#3 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

Organization	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Chinese Academy of Sciences	2,959	18.8	China
Harbin Institute of Technology	2,197	14.9	China
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique	2,120	19.4	France

Patents and industry

6%
of robotics articles are cited in patents
7%
of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents
5%
of robotics articles had authors from private companies (vs 6% of artificial intelligence articles in general)

Top industry organizations by publication count

Company	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Google	342	111.1	United States
Nvidia	269	72.5	United States
Honda	250	18.8	Japan

Research subject classifications are based on work supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Grant No. G-2023-22358. For details on our sourcing, methodology, and limitations, see the tool documentation.