Service robot

A service robot is a robot that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment, excluding industrial automation applications, according to the international vocabulary standard ISO 8373:2021.^[1] The category covers machines as different as the Roomba vacuum, a Boston Dynamics Spot inspecting a refinery, a Pepper humanoid greeting bank customers, and a fleet of Starship sidewalk robots delivering burritos across a campus. What links them is not their form or price but the application: a service robot does work outside the traditional factory floor, in environments built for people. Almost 200,000 professional service robots were sold worldwide in 2024, alongside close to 20 million consumer units, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) World Robotics 2025 report.^[4]

ISO 8373:2021 describes a service robot as a robot in personal use or professional use that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment, distinguishing it from an industrial robot based on intended application rather than mechanical design.^[1] The standard requires that any robot have "a degree of autonomy," defined as the "ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing, without human intervention."^[1] The IFR counted more than 205,000 professional service robots sold worldwide in 2023, a 30% jump from the previous year, and almost 200,000 in 2024 (up 9% in value), in its annual World Robotics: Service Robots report.^[3][4]

Service robots are a multi-billion dollar industry, but the category is young. The first commercially successful home service robot, the iRobot Roomba, only launched in 2002, the same period in which the Intuitive Surgical da Vinci received FDA clearance for general laparoscopic surgery.^[12] Most of the current fleet of restaurant servers, sidewalk delivery robots, hotel concierges and quadruped inspectors arrived in the last decade. The next decade is widely expected to be dominated by general-purpose humanoid robots from companies such as Figure, 1X, Apptronik and Tesla.

What is a service robot? (Definition and scope)

The authoritative definition is set out in ISO 8373:2021 Robotics, Vocabulary, the third edition of the international standard for robotics terminology.^[1] ISO 8373 first defines a robot as a programmed actuated mechanism with a degree of autonomy, performing locomotion, manipulation or positioning. It then divides robots by application into industrial robots, used in industrial automation such as welding and assembly on a factory line, and service robots, which perform useful tasks for humans or equipment outside industrial automation.^[1] The 2021 revision added a third top-level category, medical robot, although IFR statistics still count medical robots as a sub-class of service robots.^[5]

A service robot is therefore defined by what it does, not by what it looks like. The definition covers wheeled autonomous mobile robots, four-legged dogs, humanoids, drones, fixed manipulator arms with mobile bases, and even autonomous boats and farm tractors. ISO 8373 also requires a degree of autonomy, the ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing without human intervention.^[1] Purely teleoperated machines fall outside the definition.

The most important boundary is the one with industrial robots. ISO 10218, the safety standard for industrial robots, applies to robot arms used for welding, palletising and machine tending in factories. Service robots are explicitly outside that scope. Collaborative robots (cobots) such as those from Universal Robots, Doosan and Techman are technically industrial robots under ISO 10218, but many are deployed in laboratories, hospital pharmacies and retail kitchens for service tasks. The 2025 revision of ANSI/A3 R15.06 has stopped using the word "cobot" in favour of "collaborative applications".^[8]

How are service robots categorised?

The IFR, working from the ISO 8373 vocabulary, splits service robots into two main classes based on the intended user.^[5]

Personal and domestic service robots are built for use by non-professionals. Anyone can buy one in a consumer electronics shop and operate it without specialist training. The category includes household vacuum and mopping robots, robotic lawn mowers, pool cleaners, window cleaning robots, social companions, educational and entertainment robots, and assistive robots for elderly care.^[5]

Professional service robots are operated by trained personnel in commercial, institutional, military or scientific settings. They include cleaning robots in airports, robots that move pallets in warehouses, food delivery robots in restaurants, surgical robots, agricultural robots, inspection robots in oil refineries, security patrol robots, defence and search-and-rescue robots, and humanoids being trialled on warehouse floors.^[5]

A single platform can sit in either category depending on how it is sold. Pepper was a domestic robot when sold to Japanese families and a professional service robot when SoftBank deployed it as a bank greeter.^[16]

History

The history of the service robot starts long before the term was coined. Teleoperated manipulators for handling radioactive materials appeared in nuclear research labs in the late 1940s, and powered prosthetic limbs were under development by the 1960s. Most histories of the autonomous service robot begin with Shakey the Robot, built at SRI International between 1966 and 1972 with DARPA funding.^[9][10] Shakey was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its actions, using a TV camera and bump sensors and a planning algorithm called STRIPS to push boxes between rooms.^[9] The project produced the A* search algorithm, the Hough transform, and the visibility graph method.^[10]

The 1980s and 1990s saw the first commercial domestic robots. Husqvarna launched the world's first robotic lawn mower, the Solar Mower, in 1995, followed by the battery powered Automower in 1998.^[13] Sony AIBO, the entertainment robotic dog, was launched in Japan on 11 May 1999 and sold more than 170,000 units, although Sony discontinued the original line in 2006.^[11] AIBO is widely seen as the spark that turned the consumer robot from a research project into a real industry.

The true commercial breakthrough came in 2002, when iRobot released the Roomba. The Roomba was cheap (about $200 in its original form), did one thing well, and found a global market; iRobot has since sold over 40 million household robots.^[12] The same period saw the surgical robot move from research to mainstream use: the Intuitive Surgical da Vinci system, descended from late-1980s SRI International research, received FDA clearance for general laparoscopic surgery in 2000.^[14][15]

In 2005 French startup Aldebaran Robotics released the small humanoid NAO, a fixture of research labs and university classrooms. Aldebaran was acquired by SoftBank in 2012, and in June 2014 Masayoshi Son introduced Pepper, a 1.2 metre humanoid marketed as a social robot for Japanese homes and shop floors.^[16] Pepper sold around 27,000 units before production was paused in 2021.^[16] SoftBank Robotics Europe was sold to the German United Robotics Group in 2022, reverted to its original Aldebaran name, then filed for bankruptcy in February 2025; in July 2025 China's Maxvision Technology acquired the assets, including the IP for Pepper and NAO.^[17][18]

The 2010s and early 2020s brought an explosion of new service robot categories. Starship Technologies, founded in 2014 by Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, had completed over 9 million sidewalk deliveries across seven countries by late 2025, operating more than 2,700 robots.^[19] Boston Dynamics commercialised the quadruped Spot in 2020 for industrial inspection.^[20] China-based Pudu and Keenon turned the cat-faced restaurant server robot into a global sub-industry.^[25] Denmark's UVD Robots sold large numbers of UV-C disinfection robots to hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[26] By the mid 2020s the dominant story had become the humanoid wave: Figure, 1X, Apptronik Apollo, Tesla Optimus, Sanctuary Phoenix, UBTECH, Unitree and dozens of Chinese startups racing to build a general-purpose bipedal worker.^[29] In December 2025 iRobot, the company that created the consumer service robot market, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and agreed to be acquired by its Chinese contract manufacturer Shenzhen Picea Robotics, with existing Roomba products to remain supported.^[32]

What are service robots used for? (Application areas)

The IFR organises service robots by application class. The largest categories, with representative platforms and vendors, are listed below.

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The single largest application class by units sold is transportation and logistics, which accounted for around 113,000 of the roughly 205,000 professional service robots sold in 2023 and 102,900 units (up 14%) of those sold in 2024.^[3][4] Hospitality came next at over 54,000 units in 2023, but contracted to about 42,000 (down 11%) in 2024.^[3][4] Professional cleaning robots grew 34% to more than 25,000 units in 2024, agriculture slipped 6% to close to 19,500, and search-and-rescue and security rose 19% to about 3,100.^[4] Medical robots are smaller in unit terms (around 6,100 in 2023, climbing 91% to 16,700 in 2024) but generate disproportionately large revenues since surgical systems can sell for over a million dollars each.^[3][4]

Market and statistics: how big is the service robot market?

The most widely cited source of service robot statistics is the IFR's annual World Robotics: Service Robots report.^[2] Werner Kraus, chair of the IFR Service Robot Committee, summarised the market's logic in the 2025 edition: "In times of labor scarcity, service robots help to reduce manual labor and open up new ways."^[4] Headline numbers from the 2024 and 2025 editions are summarised below.

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The robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model, in which customers rent rather than buy, grew 31% in 2024 as companies sought to automate without heavy upfront investment.^[4] Market value estimates vary depending on what is counted. Industry trackers such as Statista, Interact Analysis and Mordor Intelligence put the global service robotics market at roughly $40-50 billion in 2024 and project well over $100 billion by 2030, with the fastest-growing segment expected to be humanoid robots (around $2.9 billion in 2025, projected to exceed $15 billion by 2030).

The IFR also publishes a parallel report on consumer service robots, mostly floor cleaners, lawn mowers and pool cleaners.^[4] Consumer unit sales are an order of magnitude larger than professional sales: close to 20 million consumer service robots sold in 2024 (up 11%), and iRobot alone has shipped over 40 million household robots.^[4][12]

Technical building blocks

A modern service robot is a fusion of mobile robotics, perception, manipulation, machine learning and human-robot interaction software.

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Since 2023 the field has moved from hand-engineered behaviour stacks toward end-to-end learned models. Google DeepMind's RT-2, the open-source OpenVLA from Stanford, and NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T family are vision-language-action (VLA) models that take a camera image and a natural-language instruction and directly output robot actions.^[27][28] They underpin the bet that the new generation of humanoid service robots can be trained once and then deployed on many different tasks.

Most service robots are built on top of the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), originally developed at Willow Garage in 2007 and now maintained by the Open Source Robotics Foundation. ROS 2 is the de facto framework for most non-humanoid service robots.

How do service robots differ from industrial robots and cobots?

The distinction between service, industrial and collaborative robots is sometimes blurred in marketing language, but the international standards still draw clear lines.

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The IFR uses a simple rule of thumb: an industrial robot does industrial work, a service robot does everything else, and cobots are a flavour of industrial robot that can share space with humans.^[5]

Major manufacturers

The service robot industry is more fragmented than the industrial robot business, which is dominated by the "Big Four" of Fanuc, KUKA, ABB and Yaskawa. The IFR tracks more than 1,200 service robot suppliers worldwide; some of the most prominent are listed below.^[4]

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Standards and regulation

Service robots are covered by an overlapping patchwork of international, national and industry standards.

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ISO 13482 is the standard most often cited for consumer service robots. It identifies three types of personal care robot, mobile servant, physical assistant and person carrier, and lays out the main hazards (collision, sharp edges, electrical, energy storage, software faults) that designers must address.^[6] It does not cover toys, medical devices or industrial machines.^[6]

Regulation is evolving fastest in the delivery and humanoid spaces. Several U.S. states now have laws specifically governing personal delivery devices. The EU's AI Act, in force from 2024, will apply additional risk-based obligations to robots incorporating high-risk AI systems.

Trends and outlook

A few clear trends are visible in the 2024-2026 service robotics market.

The humanoid wave. The clearest single shift is the bet that a general-purpose bipedal robot will eventually outperform purpose-built service robots on a wide range of tasks. Figure, 1X, Apptronik, Tesla, Sanctuary, Agility Robotics, and a long list of Chinese firms including Unitree, UBTECH, Fourier Intelligence and AgiBot are all racing to build humanoids that can be deployed in warehouses, retail and eventually homes. Apptronik raised $520 million at a $5 billion valuation in February 2026 to scale Apollo, and Tesla unveiled Optimus Gen 3 in October 2025.^[29]

Foundation models in robotics. RT-2, OpenVLA, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T and π0 from Physical Intelligence are vision-language-action models that replace stacks of hand-coded behaviours with single end-to-end neural networks.^[27][28] Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models into Spot, allowing the robot to read complex gauges, identify spills and reason about what it sees on an inspection round.^[21]

Robot-as-a-service. The rental model grew 31% in 2024 as customers sought automation without heavy capital spending. IFR President Takayuki Ito noted that "more-and-more companies are deciding to enter into subscription or rental agreements."^[4]

China dominance in cleaning and hospitality. China is now both the largest single buyer of service robots and the largest single producer.^[4]

Cloud robotics. Manufacturers run their fleets through cloud platforms (Boston Dynamics Orbit, AWS RoboMaker, custom Pudu and Keenon stacks) that collect telemetry, push over-the-air updates and share learning across the fleet.

Privacy concerns. A robot vacuum maps your home, a hotel robot films its corridors, a security robot recognises faces. Several high-profile incidents (including a 2022 Roomba mapping image leak) have made regulators much more sensitive to what service robots see.

Convergence with cobots. As collaborative arms get cheaper and service robots get more capable manipulators, the line between a wheeled cobot and a mobile manipulator service robot is increasingly blurry. The 2025 ANSI R15.06 update dropped the word "cobot" entirely in favour of "collaborative applications".^[8]

Limitations and challenges

Despite the headline numbers, service robotics still has serious unsolved problems.

Cost. A Spot robot costs around $75,000 to $150,000 depending on configuration, a TIAGo with arms is in the same range, and a humanoid such as Apptronik Apollo or Figure 02 is well above six figures. Roomba has shown a service robot can be cheap, but professional robots still carry industrial price tags.

Battery life. Most legged and humanoid service robots run for one to four hours per charge. This is enough for inspection rounds but not for an eight-hour shift.

Real-world generalisation. A demo video of a humanoid folding laundry is very different from a robot that reliably folds laundry in any of a thousand different homes. Foundation models such as Isaac GR00T and π0 target this gap, but it is still the central technical problem of the industry.

Trust and acceptance. Pepper sold only around 27,000 units before production was paused in 2021, partly because customers did not know what to do with it.^[16] Hospitals have found that nurses sometimes resist mobile robots that take corridor space without obvious benefit.

Liability. When a Roomba shreds a sock the customer absorbs the loss; when a delivery robot rolls over a pedestrian's foot the question of who is liable is much harder. Insurance and case law are still catching up.

Regulatory fragmentation. A delivery robot may be legal in Texas, restricted in California, banned in San Francisco, and require special permits in many European cities. This patchwork is one of the larger barriers to scaling on-street service robots.

See also

• Robotics
• Humanoid robot
• Autonomous mobile robot
• Social Robot
• NAO (robot)
• Robot Operating System

References

1. International Organization for Standardization. *ISO 8373:2021 Robotics, Vocabulary*. https://www.iso.org/standard/75539.html ↩
2. International Federation of Robotics. *Service Robots*. https://ifr.org/service-robots ↩
3. International Federation of Robotics. *Sales of Service Robots up 30% Worldwide*. Press release, 8 October 2024. https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/sales-of-service-robots-up-30-worldwide ↩
4. International Federation of Robotics. *Service Robots See Global Growth Boom: World Robotics 2025 Service Robots report*. Press release, 7 October 2025. https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/service-robots-see-global-growth-boom ↩
5. International Federation of Robotics. *Definition of Service Robots*. https://ifr.org/img/worldrobotics/Definition_Service_Robots_2026.pdf ↩
6. International Organization for Standardization. *ISO 13482:2014 Robots and robotic devices, Safety requirements for personal care robots*. https://www.iso.org/standard/53820.html ↩
7. International Organization for Standardization. *ISO/TS 15066:2016 Robots and robotic devices, Collaborative robots*. https://www.iso.org/standard/62996.html
8. ANSI Blog. *What Is ANSI/A3 R15.06-2025 / ANSI/A3 R15.06-3-2025?* https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/ansi-a3-r15-06-2025-robot-safety/ ↩
9. SRI International. *Shakey the Robot*. https://www.sri.com/hoi/shakey-the-robot/ ↩
10. Wikipedia. *Shakey the Robot*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakey_the_robot ↩
11. Wikipedia. *AIBO*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIBO ↩
12. National Museum of American History. *Roomba Robot Vacuum Cleaner*. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1448432 ↩
13. Husqvarna Group. *History timeline*. https://www.husqvarnagroup.com/en/history-timeline ↩
14. Wikipedia. *Da Vinci Surgical System*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System ↩
15. Intuitive Surgical. *Company History*. https://www.intuitive.com/en-us/about-us/company/history ↩
16. Wikipedia. *Pepper (robot)*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot) ↩
17. SoftBank Robotics Group. *German United Robotics Group acquires SoftBank Robotics Europe*. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/news/20220412a/ ↩
18. United Robotics Group. *Establishing an international robotics key player*. https://unitedrobotics.group/en/news-events-press/press-releases/establishing-an-international-robotics-key-player ↩
19. Wikipedia. *Starship Technologies*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Technologies ↩
20. Boston Dynamics. *Spot product page*. https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/ ↩
21. Boston Dynamics blog. *Tools for Your To Do List with Spot and Gemini Robotics*. https://bostondynamics.com/blog/tools-for-your-to-do-list-with-spot-and-gemini-robotics/ ↩
22. ANYbotics. *ANYmal Autonomous Robotic Inspection Solution*. https://www.anybotics.com/robotics/anymal/
23. PAL Robotics. *TIAGo Mobile Manipulator Robot*. https://pal-robotics.com/robot/tiago/
24. Toyota Europe. *Robotics at Toyota*. https://www.toyota-europe.com/innovation/mobility-solutions/robotics
25. Pudu Robotics. *BellaBot product page*. https://www.pudurobotics.com/product/detail/bellabot ↩
26. Blue Ocean Robotics. *UVD Robots*. https://uvd.blue-ocean-robotics.com/ ↩
27. NVIDIA Newsroom. *NVIDIA Announces Isaac GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Humanoid Robots*. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-isaac-gr00t-n1-open-humanoid-robot-foundation-model-simulation-frameworks ↩
28. Wikipedia. *Vision-language-action model*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision-language-action_model ↩
29. CNBC. *Apptronik raises $520 million at $5 billion valuation for Apollo robot*. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/apptronik-raises-520-million-at-5-billion-valuation-for-apollo-robot.html ↩
30. The Robot Report. *Service robot sales climb by 30% worldwide, reports the IFR*. https://www.therobotreport.com/service-robot-sales-climb-30-percent-worldwide-reports-ifr/
31. Wikipedia. *Service robot*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_robot
32. Manufacturing Dive. *Roomba, Braava maker iRobot files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, seeks acquisition by Picea*. https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/roomba-braava-maker-irobot-chapter-11-bankruptcy-acquisition-picea-china/807997/ ↩