Key takeaways
- Transport and logistics was the largest professional service robot application in 2025, at 47% of sales, according to IFR data as summarized by Supply Chain 247.
- Global professional service robot shipments rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, per the IFR.
- IFR figures come from a survey of 238 suppliers and are not projected to the whole industry, so they show direction, not your floor.
- Track throughput, labor hours, exceptions and uptime for at least one full quarter before expanding.
- Let a site assessment set the scope of any lease, not a headline share.
What did transport and logistics lead in 2025?
Transport and logistics was the largest professional service robot application in 2025, with 47% of sales. That share comes from the IFR's World Robotics 2026 service robot report as summarized by Supply Chain 247, which puts the category at about 117,500 units, up 21%. The IFR press headline gives 117,000 for transport and logistics, so the unit count sits between those two figures.
The wider market grew as well. According to the IFR press release, global professional service robot shipments rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025. Logistics stood out because warehouses, distribution centers and freight yards run repetitive, high volume moves, and repetitive moves are where robots tend to be scheduled first.
How much weight should the IFR numbers carry?
Less than the headline suggests, at least for your building. The figures come from a supplier survey of 238 producers, drawn from 1,001 manufacturers, and the IFR does not project them to the whole industry. A share of sales shows where vendors are selling. It does not show how one aisle, one dock or one cross dock will behave.
Year to year comparisons need care too. The IFR discourages direct comparisons between its reports because its sample changes. Its earlier report counted more than 199,000 professional service robot units for 2024, with sales up 9% that year, and that figure is useful as background rather than as a trend line.
Why do labor and throughput pressure drive the decision?
Warehouse managers rarely adopt robots because a chart looks promising. They act when the same ceiling keeps appearing. A dock that empties late, a pick zone that stalls at shift change or a replenishment run that waits on one driver all point to the same problem: work queues behind a limited number of people.
Labor pressure makes that queue hard to clear with overtime alone, and peak season makes it expensive when orders stack onto a fixed crew. Autonomous mobile robots can take the repetitive legs of those moves, carrying totes and pallets along set routes. They will not fix a weak slotting plan or a late inbound truck, and a team that expects them to will be disappointed.
What should a team track for one quarter?
Pick five measures, record them before the first robot arrives, and keep recording them for at least one full quarter. The goal is a baseline in your own numbers, gathered the same way every week. Keep the shifts, zones and definitions fixed, so a change reflects operations rather than a shifting count.
Leave vanity counts out of the review. Total robot hours reward a busy machine, not a finished order, so they should never stand in for the measures below.
- Units moved per labor hour, by zone and by shift, so gains and losses have a location.
- Dock to stock time for inbound pallets, from trailer open to putaway confirmed.
- Exception rate, counting jams, blocked aisles, manual rescues and missed scans per thousand moves.
- Idle travel minutes for forklifts and carts on your heaviest routes.
- Uptime and charging availability for any automated equipment already in service, including how long a unit waits for a dock.
How should you read the quarter's data?
Read the five measures together, never one at a time. A rise in units per labor hour counts for less if exceptions climb faster, because a machine that creates rescues only moves the work around. Low idle time on a route shows the robot is busy, not that the route was worth automating.
Write the decision rules down before the data arrives. Decide which result would justify a second zone, which would justify changing the route or rack layout first, and which would mean stopping. Settled rules keep the expansion call from going to whichever number looks best on a slide.
Fix the review date now, with the same report and the same attendees each time, so the team reads every quarter the same way.
Where does a lease fit once the data is in?
A lease is a financing route to the robots, not a shortcut past the baseline. Service Robot Co. offers commercial robot leasing on a three year lease, with one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment. That assessment is where your quarter of measurements carries the most weight, because it shows which routes can support a robot now and which need the layout or process fixed first.
We work as an OEM neutral integrator. We pick the robot type that fits the work across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so one team answers for the whole fleet. If your data points to one zone instead of the whole building, say so. A narrower first lease is a legitimate result of a good baseline.
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