2022 Will See 452,000 Mobile Robot Shipments, a 65% increase versus 2021

In its new whitepaper, 70 Technology Trends That Will—and Will Not—Shape 2022, ABI Research analysts identify 35 trends that will shape the technology market and 35 others that, although attracting huge amounts of speculation and commentary, are less likely to move the needle over the next twelve months. “The fallout from COVID-19 prevention measures, the process of transitioning from pandemic to endemic disease, and global political tensions weigh heavily on the coming year’s fortunes. This whitepaper is a tool for our readers to help shape their understanding of the key critical trends that look set to materialize in 2022 as the world begins to emerge from the shadow of COVID-19. It also highlights those much-vaunted trends that are less likely to have meaningful impact in 2022,” says Stuart Carlaw, Chief Research Officer at ABI Research.

What Will Happen in 2022:

Hardware-Based Robot Operating System Optimization
Robotics processor vendors will increasingly offer Robot Operating System (ROS)-based solutions for hardware acceleration across the entirety of robotics offerings. This should help tackle the problem of system integration and entice developers to adopt more off-the-shelf processors and hardware. Furthermore, the hardware-software optimization will provide a set of benchmarks and standards for the field, which is fairly fragmented at the moment, accelerating the time-to-market. As a total of 45,000 cobots and 452,000 mobile robots are expected to be shipped in 2022, a 65% and 51% Y-o-Y growth, end users are expected to benefit from the tighter integration.

What Won’t Happen in 2022:

The Democratization of Robotics Expertise
While the emergence of ROS and various robotics startups will offer real advances in the short term, robotics as a whole suffers from a significant shortage in expertise. In the long run, this will have an adverse effect on development and commercialization. Considerable investment in resource- and time-intensive areas requiring experts from different fields is badly needed, but this will not happen anytime soon.

For more trends that will—and won’t—happen in 2022, download the whitepaper 70 Technology Trends That Will—and Will Not—Shape 2022.