Where the Industrial Robots Roam

Industrial robots have been invading the workforce over the last decade, with some people worrying that they have been taking over the jobs that people previously performed and others saying that they lead to the creation of new high-tech jobs.

But where exactly are the robots? You might expect that they'd be evenly distributed across the United States or concentrated in states with big high-tech industries like California and Boston. If you thought either of those things, you'd be wrong. A new study from Brookings that maps robot concentration in the U.S. concludes:

"Robots, it turns out, are congregating densely in some places but are hardly found in others. Specifically, the map makes clear that while industrial robots are by no means everywhere; they are clustered heavily in a short list of Midwestern and Southern manufacturing states, especially the upper Midwest."

There's a reason for that. Industrial robots are used heavily in the auto industry, which deploys nearly half of all industrial robots. And so, the study found that "more than half of the nation's 233,305 industrial robots are burning welds, painting cars, assembling products, handling materials, or packaging things in just 10 Midwestern and Southern states." The leader is Michigan, with 28,000 robots (12 percent of the nation's total), followed by Ohio (20,400 robots, 8.7 percent), Indiana (19,400 robots, 8.3 percent), and Tennessee just behind it.

If you look at the map more closely, you see robot concentrations in certain areas within those states, notably Detroit with more than 15,000 industrial robots, which comes out to 8.5 per 1,000 workers. Other manufacturing centers like Toledo, Grand Rapids, Louisville, and Nashville also have high robot concentrations.

By the way, robots are top-of-mind for CEOs these days. The Wall Street Journal cited the Brookings study as one of the most important things that CEOs are reading these days.

There are, of course, many other kinds of uses that robots can be put other than industrial. And there's a good chance that in the future, mobile apps and IoT will be used increasingly in concert with robotics. For example, a robot for the home called Kuri is controlled by a mobile app. You can expect that most robots will follow suit and will work with IoT devices or include their own IoT sensors.