Humanoid Robot Shipments Forecast to Reach 26 Million Annually by 2040 - IoT Business News

By Marc Kavinsky, Lead Editor at IoT Business News.

Berg Insight expects annual humanoid robot shipments to rise from 16,000 units in 2026 to 26 million by 2040, while cellular connections associated with humanoid robots could reach 50.6 million over the same period.

Humanoid robots have spent years attracting attention through demonstrations and prototype programs, but their commercial significance will ultimately depend less on individual machines than on whether vendors can manufacture, deploy and manage them at scale. New forecasts from Berg Insight suggest that this transition is beginning, with production volumes expected to increase sharply over the next decade and beyond. The research firm forecasts annual humanoid robot shipments to grow from 16,000 units in 2026 to 26.0 million units worldwide by 2040, equivalent to a compound annual growth rate of 63.7 percent. It expects the corresponding market value to rise from US$890 million to US$554 billion.

From prototypes to production systems

More than 100 companies are now developing full-size humanoid robots, according to Berg Insight. Most remain at the research, prototype or pilot deployment stage, but a smaller group is beginning to scale production or prepare for larger commercial manufacturing. The forecast also implies an expanding role for connectivity providers and IoT platform vendors if humanoid deployments reach the volumes Berg Insight anticipates. Managing tens of millions of connected robots would create requirements around provisioning, diagnostics, remote software distribution and fleet visibility that closely resemble established IoT device-management challenges, although applied to substantially more complex endpoints.

The scale of Berg Insight’s forecast remains a long-term projection, but the more immediate signal is that humanoid robotics is beginning to move from experimental development toward an industry concerned with manufacturing, software ecosystems and connected fleet operations.

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