Why Transport Robots Took 47% of 2025 Shipments, Explained

What the 47% figure actually measures

Transport and logistics accounted for 47% of professional service robot shipments in 2025, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). Its World Robotics 2026 Service Robots report, published September 30, 2026, puts the category at 117,500 units, up 21% from the prior year. Total professional service robot shipments rose 24% to almost 250,000 units.

The IFR press release headline rounds the category to 117,000, while the report body gives 117,500. This article uses the body figure.

These are shipments reported by suppliers in a survey sample. They are not a count of every service robot working in US facilities, and the IFR says the figures are not projected to represent the whole industry. Treat 47% as a share of what the sample recorded.

How IFR defines logistics

IFR treats autonomous mobile robots as service robots. If an AMR carries a robot arm, IFR counts the arm as an industrial robot and the platform as a service robot. That split matters when you compare categories, because one facility can show up in two different reports.

The logistics group covers indoor transport without public traffic, such as warehouses, factories and non-public hospital areas. It also covers indoor transport with public traffic in hospitals, hotels and restaurants, outdoor variants, and inventory counting and refilling. Packaging, pick-and-place and palletizing sit in the industrial report instead, and passenger transport is excluded.

Why transport grew faster than other categories

The growth story is largely a change in navigation. Trade coverage of the IFR data describes a move from fixed-path guided vehicles toward autonomous mobile robots that route around people and obstacles. That shift lets one platform work in mixed traffic, where a guided cart once needed a dedicated lane.

A related VDMA and IFR breakdown, reported in trade press, puts mobile robots for intralogistics up 19% in 2025 to approximately 103,700 units. Those robots move materials and goods indoors and outdoors, and they help load and unload trucks and pallets. The intralogistics figure is reported alongside the IFR data rather than as a line item inside the 117,500 total, so treat it as a companion signal.

How to read the mix without over-reading it

Three cautions matter for a facility manager. First, the 2026 report uses a sample of 238 service robot suppliers, and that sample spans service-robot segments overall, not only professional robots. IFR also warns against comparing figures across reports because sample composition can change.

Second, participation changes between editions, so the IFR warns against building a time series from these numbers. A rising share in one report may reflect a different group of respondents as much as a shift in buying.

Third, shipments are not the installed base. The figures reflect reported shipments, not the number of robots operating in logistics facilities today. A category can ship heavily in one year and still represent a smaller slice of working fleets.

How transport compares with hospitality and cleaning

Hospitality ranked second in the same report, including mobile guidance, information services and telepresence. Professional cleaning ranked third, driven largely by floor-cleaning applications, according to a summary of the IFR findings. A third-party summary of the IFR President's Report also names inspection and maintenance and professional cleaning as the fastest-growing application areas.

Be careful with year-over-year comparisons. An older IFR release put transportation and logistics at 52% of professional service robot installations in 2024, with annual sales up 14%. That uses a different measure, installations rather than shipments, so it cannot be set beside the 47% figure without adjustment.

Why lease models are gaining ground

Traditional sales remain the main monetization channel, but robot as a service keeps growing. IFR notes that in the United States, RaaS is already the dominant business model, and its survey sample of US suppliers points the same way.

Service Robot Co. offers the lease side of that shift. We lease robots only, through financing on a 3-year lease, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. Because we are OEM-neutral, the robot is matched to the floor, and the same team finances, deploys, integrates, trains and services it through a nationwide US engineer network.

What a facility team should check first

IFR names safety standards, high training and maintenance costs, and a weak business case, particularly in industrial settings, as continuing limits on adoption. Those are the places where a category mix becomes a site decision.

Start with your own traffic. Map where people, carts and forklifts already cross, count the hours that manual tugs and carts consume, and check whether a logistics robot fits those paths. The category leader tells you where suppliers are shipping. Your floor tells you what will work.

Where humanoids fit in the count

IFR recorded about 7,000 full-size humanoids above 140 cm sold in 2025 for commercial and professional use. The survey recorded roughly 17 transportation and logistics service robots for every full-size humanoid.

Most current humanoid applications remain specialized and often require human teleoperation, according to IFR. For most facility teams, transport platforms are the category that matters now.