Spending on robotics and drones will grow 17.6 percent to $115.7 billion in 2019. IDC said spending on robotics and drones will reach $210.3 billion by 2022 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.2 percent.
Research firm Gartner said global spending on robotic process automation (RPA) software will grow 57 percent to $680 million in 2018. RPA software spending will be $2.4 billion in 2022. The biggest adopters of RPA include banks, insurance companies, utilities and telecom companies.
“End-user organizations adopt RPA technology as a quick and easy fix to automate manual tasks,” said Cathy Tornbohm, vice president at Gartner.
IDC said robotics spending will be $103.4 billion in 2019. Investments in drones will total $12.3 billion in 2019 but are forecast to grow at 30.6 percent CAGR than robotics systems growth of 18.9 percent CAGR.
Hardware purchases — with nearly two thirds of all spending going toward robotic systems, after-market robotics hardware, and system hardware – will dominate robotics spending in 2019.
30 percent of robotics spending will be on industrial robots and service robots in 2019, said IDC. Robotics-related software spending will largely go toward purchases of command and control applications and robotics-specific applications.
Robotics software spending is forecast to grow at a slightly faster rate (21.7 percent CAGR) than services or hardware spending (19 percent CAGR and 18.2 percent CAGR).
Industrial robotics continues to top the technology investment priorities of manufacturing organizations across all major markets surveyed by IDC in 2018, said Jing Bing Zhang, research director, Worldwide Robotics.
The market for commercial service robotics will continue to grow at a rate of 20 percent per year for the coming five years, said John Santagate, research director for Commercial Service Robotics at IDC.
Spending on drones will be dominated by hardware purchases with roughly 90 percent of the category total going toward drones and after-market drone hardware.
Consumer drones will account for roughly 40 percent of the category total in 2019 with service drones delivering another 18 percent.
Consumer spending on drones will total $5.1 billion in 2019, accounting for a little over 40 percent of the worldwide total.
Industry spending on drones in 2019 will be led by utilities ($1.4 billion), construction ($1.05 billion) and discrete manufacturing ($913 million).
