Robotics – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2016 and 2021, researchers published roughly

180,000

English-language articles on robotics

The global robotics literature grew

34%

between 2016 and 2021

Articles on robotics made up

12%

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?

Data last updated May 17, 2023

Vital signs

178,410

robotics articles were released between 2016 and 2021 (estd.)

34%

growth in research between 2016 and 2021

12%

of all artificial intelligence articles focused on robotics

Citation impact

citations for the average robotics article

citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

20%

of robotics articles have American authors

25%

have Chinese authors

23%

have European authors

Country	Articles (2016-2021)	Growth (2016-2021)	Global share	Citations per article
China	44,835	81%	25%	11.2
United States	35,152	32%	20%	17.4
Japan	13,009	-1%	7%	7.2

Top-cited articles

Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
2019: Nature Biotechnology. 8417 citations
ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras
2016: arXiv: Robotics. 5099 citations
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Toward the Robust-Perception Age
2016: arXiv: Robotics. 2736 citations
VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator
2017: arXiv: Robotics. 2641 citations
Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Brief Survey
2017: arXiv: Learning. 2146 citations
End-to-end training of deep visuomotor policies
2016: Journal of Machine Learning Research. 2142 citations
Social LSTM: Human Trajectory Prediction in Crowded Spaces
2016: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2050 citations
Domain randomization for transferring deep neural networks from simulation to the real world
2017: arXiv: Robotics. 1704 citations
nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving
2019: arXiv: Learning. 1634 citations
An integrated design and fabrication strategy for entirely soft, autonomous robots
2016: Nature. 1616 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of robotics research (by article count)

#1 Harbin Institute of Technology (China)
#2 Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
#3 Beihang University (China)

Organization	Articles (2016-2021)	Citations per article	Country
Harbin Institute of Technology	2,117	12.7	China
Chinese Academy of Sciences	1,951	25.7	China
Beihang University	1,523	15.9	China

Patents and industry

of robotics articles are cited in patents

of artificial intelligence articles are cited in patents

of robotics articles had authors from private companies (vs 4% of artificial intelligence articles in general)