U.S. Robot Installations Rose 12% Last Year. The Growth Came From Outside the Car Plant

For most of the past two decades, the story of American factory robotics has been a story about car plants. Body shops, paint lines and powertrain assembly absorbed the bulk of every year's installations, and the integrators, maintenance skills and safety practices that grew up around robots grew up there too. The latest global data says that story is changing. Robot demand in the United States rebounded strongly in 2025, but the car industry did not drive it. The new robots are going into food plants, warehouses and medical production, which means a growing share of the country's automation is being run by operations teams doing it for the first time.

A Rebound Without the Usual Engine

The International Federation of Robotics published its World Robotics 2026 findings for the United States on September 24. American manufacturers installed 38,400 industrial robots in 2025, a 12% increase on the year before. That was enough to pass Japan, which installed 36,200, and make the United States the second-largest robot market in the world. China remains in a different league, with 354,200 installations and 59% of global demand.

"US robot demand has rebounded very strongly: 2025 ranked as the third strongest year on record behind 2018 and 2022," said Jane Heffner, President of the IFR. "Growth came from the food industry and sectors like warehousing, logistics or medical. At the same time automotive has stayed stable as the largest customer."

The sector figures show how little of the gain came from traditional buyers. Automotive installations slipped 1% to 13,500, still the largest single customer but roughly a third of the total. The metal and machinery industry, the second-largest buyer, fell 15% to 3,000 units. Food and beverage jumped 30% to 2,900 units and is now close to overtaking machinery outright. The IFR also notes that most robots installed in the United States are still imported from Japan and Europe, even as domestic integrators and a handful of American robot makers have emerged.

The 2026 Order Book Points the Same Way

Order data for this year suggests the shift is continuing rather than reversing. The Association for Advancing Automation reported, in figures covered by The Robot Report in August, that North American companies ordered 17,995 robots worth $1.166 billion in the first half of 2026, up 2.0% in units and 6.6% in value. Underneath that modest headline, automotive OEM orders fell 25% compared with the first half of 2025.

Other sectors made up the difference. Automotive component orders rose 24% in units, food and consumer goods rose 17%, semiconductors and electronics rose 35%, and life sciences, pharmaceutical and biomedical orders rose 32%. Non-automotive customers accounted for 56% of units ordered in the second quarter. "The first half of 2026 shows how the mix of the robotics market continues to evolve," said Alex Shikany, executive vice president at A3.

That breadth matters because the base is still thin. In a Manufacturing Dive report in May, Intrinsic CTO Brian Gerkey was cited as saying that 80% of U.S. manufacturing facilities have zero automation. The same report notes that U.S. installations peaked at 44,000 units in 2023, so last year's rebound still sits below that high. Deloitte's 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations Survey, cited in the piece, found that 41% of respondents planned to prioritise factory automation investments over the next two years. Many of the plants placing those orders will be buying their first serious robots.

New Buyers Inherit the Hard Part

Car plants spent decades learning how to make robots pay. They standardised cells, built in-house controls teams and designed products around automation. A snack producer or a contract medical manufacturer installing its first picking robots has none of that infrastructure, and its production is often more variable. "Most automation today is built for highly standardized, repeatable processes," Intrinsic's Stefan Nusser told Manufacturing Dive. He also described the cost of a legacy, conveyor-based line that requires overhauling the entire structure and workflow to change.

That is the practical risk in the new demand. A robot that runs well at commissioning can lose much of its value if changeovers stay slow, if the line around it cannot handle new product variants, or if nobody on shift can see when it is underperforming. "There is no doubt interest is high across the board, but execution is where things get difficult," said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, in the same report. For first-time adopters, execution means integration with existing equipment, visibility of output on the floor and a workforce that trusts the system enough to run it.

What Operations Leaders Should Do Now

The plants now driving robot demand are the ones with the least margin for a stalled project. A few disciplines separate an installation that pays back from one that becomes an expensive bystander.

• Assess readiness before choosing hardware: map data infrastructure, controls skills and integration points across the plant first, so the robot is sized to what the site can actually support.
• Design for changeovers, not the demo: food and consumer goods lines change product often, so judge any cell on how quickly it handles a new SKU, not on peak speed with a single product.
• Look at the line, not just the cell: a fast robot feeding a fixed conveyor simply moves the bottleneck, so plan material flow around the automation from the start.
• Make robot performance visible on shift: put cell output, stoppages and changeover times in front of supervisors in real time, so problems are caught on the day rather than in the monthly report.
• Build skills before go-live: train operators and maintenance staff on the new equipment during installation, because a first-time adopter cannot borrow a controls team from the plant next door.
• Plan for imported equipment: with most U.S. robots still sourced from Japan and Europe, confirm spare parts lead times and local service coverage before signing.

The United States now buys more robots than Japan, and the buyers look different from the ones that built the market. That broadening is good news for productivity, but only if the food plants, warehouses and medical manufacturers now placing orders get the integration, visibility and skills right the first time.