IFR's 2025 Data: Transport Robots Took 47% of Shipments

What did transport robots take in 2025?

Transportation and logistics was the largest application for professional service robots in 2025. According to IFR's World Robotics 2026 Service Robots report, as relayed by Supply Chain 247, the category shipped about 117,500 units, up 21%, and made up about 47% of the total.

The wider picture adds texture. Supply Chain Digital reports that global professional service robot shipments rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025. Transport grew a little more slowly than the whole, yet it still held nearly half the units, so its lead comes from scale rather than from outpacing everything else.

For a facility choosing a first robot project, the headline is simple. Moving goods is where service robot shipments are deepest, which makes it a sensible place to start looking. The numbers only help once you know where they stop.

Why do the unit counts differ between reports?

Not every source lands on the same figure. Supply Chain 247 and Supply Chain Digital coverage use 117,500 units for transport. A German-language report from Logistik heute, also linked to IFR, rounds the same category to 117,000. The gap is about 500 units, small enough to vanish in a trend and large enough that a board member may ask which number is right.

This article uses 117,500 and credits Supply Chain 247. Before the figure goes into a formal document, check the wording against IFR's own release, and name the secondary source you used.

How large is the sample behind the shares?

The figures come from a survey of 238 service robot suppliers, drawn from a sample universe of 1,001 manufacturers. IFR says the data is not projected to the whole industry, so the 47% describes what the surveyed group reported shipping, not every robot delivered in 2025.

IFR also advises against comparing figures across World Robotics reports, because the sample composition changes from one edition to the next. A rise or dip between tables may reflect who responded as much as how the market moved.

What does the 47% share leave out?

A shipment count shows how many units left suppliers. It does not show how many ran reliably, how often they stalled at a doorway, or how well a given corridor suited them. Those answers only come from your floor, measured over several weeks.

The share also applies to professional service robots alone. It is not a share of all robots, and it says nothing about categories IFR does not count in this group. Read it as direction, not as a forecast for your building.

What should a first project take from this?

The lead in transport points to a practical starting place. Repetitive hauling is work that robots have been shipped to do at volume, so a first-time team can build a shortlist around a task with a track record instead of an experiment. The route still decides the fit, not the industry chart.

Four questions narrow the field before anyone discusses a specific model:

• How many times per shift does one person push or carry the same load along the same path?
• Does the path cross doors, elevators or loading aprons that need extra handling?
• Can the route run in hours that avoid stopping live operations?
• Can a site assessment map the route without rebuilding any part of the floor?

How should a first transport robot be tested?

Start with one leased unit on one route, and set the measures before the robot arrives. Completed trips, idle minutes, manual handoffs and exceptions logged each shift give the team a baseline to beat. Running the route alongside existing work avoids a shutdown for cutover, and a robot pilot program can be widened only after those numbers hold.

Service Robot Co. is an OEM-neutral integrator. We choose the robot that fits the route rather than one manufacturer's catalog, then lease, deploy, configure, train and service it through a nationwide US engineer network. The lease runs for three years, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment, so the payment is known before the first unit arrives.

One partner and one number cover the whole cycle, from site assessment through go-live support and repair. That continuity matters most in the early weeks, when a single route is still proving itself and every stalled trip gets noticed.