Robotics – ETO Research Almanac

ETO Research Almanac

Between 2018 and 2023, researchers published roughly

260,000

English-language articles on robotics

The global robotics literature grew

47%

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 January 6, 2025

Vital signs

258,105
robotics articles were released between 2018 and 2023 (estd.)
47%
growth in research between 2018 and 2023
14%
of all artificial intelligence articles focused on robotics

Citation impact

11
citations for the average robotics article
16
citations for the average artificial intelligence article

Countries

16%
of robotics articles have American authors
28%
have Chinese authors
20%
have European authors

Country	Articles (2018-2023)	Growth (2018-2023)	Global share	Citations per article
China	71,114	134%	28%	10.1
United States	41,731	24%	16%	18.7
Japan	17,699	-5%	7%	6

Top-cited articles

PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds
2018: arXiv. 3,610 citations
Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset
2019: arXiv. 2,760 citations
ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual–Inertial, and Multimap SLAM
2020: IEEE Transactions on robotics. 2,732 citations
Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications
2018: arXiv. 2,371 citations
Social GAN: Socially Acceptable Trajectories with Generative Adversarial Networks
2018: arXiv. 2,153 citations
Small-scale soft-bodied robot with multimodal locomotion
2018: Nature. 1,858 citations
Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation
2018: arXiv. 1,852 citations
SemanticKITTI: A Dataset for Semantic Scene Understanding of LiDAR Sequences
2019: arXiv. 1,838 citations
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
2020: arXiv. 1,719 citations
LeGO-LOAM: Lightweight and Ground-Optimized Lidar Odometry and Mapping on Variable Terrain
2018: Intelligent Robots and Systems. 1,637 citations

Research organizations

Top producers of robotics research (by article count)

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

Organization	Articles (2018-2023)	Citations per article	Country
Chinese Academy of Sciences	2,800	16.4	China
Harbin Institute of Technology	2,505	12.9	China
Tsinghua University	2,069	21.9	China

Patents and industry

5%
of robotics articles are cited in patents
5%
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	439	100.8	United States
Robotics Research	301	14.6	United States
Honda	285	17.5	Japan

The Research Almanac runs on bibliometric data from Clarivate Web of Science and other sources. 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.