Robotics Predictions for 2025

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2024-12-25 21:00:04

This year was probably the most exciting year for general-purpose robotics in history. In a note that I wrote near the beginning of the year, I outlined how I expected the field to unfold, and what kinds of startups I thought would make sense. It's pretty interesting to re-read that note in the context of some pretty amazing advancements. In this post, I figured I would make a few more predictions for what I expect will happen over the course of the next year.

By this I mean, most humanoid robots will contain more or less the same components, and these components will be free for anyone to produce. Economies of scale will drive existing incumbents away from their own proprietary components and towards commodity components.

I'm defining this as some company that has been working on a model in isolation for some time, which it then releases into some commodity robotics platform, magically making that robot capable of doing general-purpose tasks with a high reliability.

By "consumers", I mean people who are buying robots mostly for personal use, although there will be quite a lot of overlap with business uses as people experiment with them on their own.