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Robotics in the News, 2019–2026: Volume, Geography and Tone of Global Robotics Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: We measure how robots and robotics were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 285,504 de-duplicated robotics articles, and set that coverage beside 227,037 research papers (2015–2025) and 311,246 patent families (2015–2024) on robotics. Six results stand out: Growing attention. Robotics rose from 18.17 to 22.39 articles per 10,000 news articles between 2019 and 2025, a 23.2% increase in share, after a low of 14.34 in 2020. A January peak. January carries 10.23% of a typical year's robotics news, the largest share of any month. It is the month of the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Geography. Robotics is most over-represented in the news of Denmark (4.56) and Taiwan (3.9), and, among large sources, China (3.44), Germany (3.33), Japan (3.18) and South Korea (2.81). The United States holds nearly half of located robotics news (47.75%) at a lift of 0.99, and India is under-represented (0.49). Within India, Karnataka (2.43), Telangana (2.43) and Kerala (2.35) lead; within the United States, Nevada (4.3), Massachusetts (3.01) and California (2.2). China's attention to robotics rose 2.06-fold from 2023 to 2025. Tone and urgency. 92.9% of robotics articles are positive in tone (all news: 56.8%), and 54.9% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Robotics news from Ukraine and Russia is the exception, at more than 40% negative. Measurement. 23.7% of raw matches for robot vocabulary were templated pages, shopping deals, market-report advertisements, entertainment items or office-software automation. Counting them would inflate coverage and would distort its geography. Research and invention. Robotics papers grew from 21.61 to 46.99 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (2.17 times). Robotics patent families grew 4.46-fold from 2015 to 2024, and 77.4% of them were filed in China.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23447193
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222866887
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