Interesting Robot Statistics from
International Federation of Robotics (http://www.ifr.org/)
[img align=left]http://www.ifr.org/picture/stat2.gif[/img]
If that showed annual sales instead of accumulated sales, it would probably paint a different picture. It appears that it would show a fairly straight line of annual sales. Plus, when we throw in the past couple of years, it may look a whole lot different.
Also these are only industrial robots. It does not count robots used for military, exploration, medicine, education, or entertainment.
In 1998 entertainment and home robot sales started to climb. The first release of the Sony AIBO dog alone added another 1,500 in 1999. I'm not sure how you would categorize LEGO Mindstorms, but thousands have been sold.
I guess I just think that the graph is a bit deceiving. It looks like there is significant growth in the market for industrial robots, but it reallys shows a pretty consistent number of sales. I don't know what the life span of an industrial robot is. They can't last as long as some mainframes have, mechanical objects have a much greater amount of wear. It is possible that the industrial robots bought in 1990 would need to be replaced in 1998 after welding on or painting 10 million cars. Plus, the quality and precision offered by newer robots would cause older robots to be replaced. I do like the fact that the graph only includes industrial robots. I think that there is much more room for employment of college grads in programming and maintaining those robots rather than developing toy robots. Those are probably mass produced by industrial robots included in the graph.
I did a quick search for other stats, some interesting, but none take into account replacement through robot retirement.
Still, don't let your Eyebot experience define your preception about how well industry robots are engineered. :-)
One interesting stat I came across was the increase in robot population in Japan. One source stated that the estimated number of industrial robots in Japan is over 700 Thousand!