The Upsurge of Humanoid

In robotics, mobility is the new frontier. Fixed (industrial) robot have already found their major application areas in manufacturing and other traditional sectors. However, service robots have a very potential market in many new applications such as education and entertainment, research and space exploration, personal assistance and care-giving, search and rescue, public relations, and several others. Humanoid is one of the faster growing part of service robots. The ability of humanoid robots is to perform a broad range of promising tasks autonomously, especially for specialized applications to assist humans in performing several day to day tasks. These are also finding its applications in several other sectors such as cleaning, inspection, maintenance, and surveillance. Although humanoid robots are finding increasing demand from several applications, they are also coming across the availability of high technological features equipped robots at affordable prices.

The market for humanoid is up-surging due to the driving factors which include introduction of advanced features in humanoid robot, increasing use of humanoid as educational robots, and growing demand from retail industry for personal assistance. However, the high initial cost and R&D expenses acting as inhibiting factor for the humanoid robot market. Research is going on to overcome these problems, which can generate new opportunities for the humanoid robot market. Some of the opportunities are rapid growth in aging population worldwide, rise in demand from medical and logistics sector, and rising trend of autonomous operation for rescue. Furthermore, the lack of high level interfacing causing unpredictable performance of humanoid robot has been a key challenge being faced by the industry.

The humanoid robot system is the latest technology that has the potential of replacing humans in many of the situations hazardous for human being. The humanoid robot manufacturers are undergoing various R&D activities to come up with more affordable humanoid robots and also are making enormous efforts to make the humanoid robotic system more efficient in terms of accuracy and functionality as compared to human.

In the humanoid robot market most of the players have adopted the strategy of product launch to achieve growth and to stay competitive in recent years. Other strategies adopted are expansions, acquisitions, agreements, and collaborations. Major players of humanoid robot market are SoftBank, ROBOTIS, KAWADA ROBOTICS, Honda Motor, UBTECH ROBOTICS, Hajime Research Institute, Hanson Robotics, DST Robot Co., PAL Robotics, Toyota Motor, and ROBO GARAGE.