Robot population up tenfold in last six years

Back in 2004 the UN kicked off an annual census of the world's robot population and concluded that there were slightly more than 600,000 domestic robots in the world - that's excluding industrial robots of the sort that one commonly imagines making cars. The story was covered by Collision Detection, Slashdot and others at the time, with Collision Detection commenting

"Words fail to express my unbridled delight that global civil servants actually spend their time collating this information."

This was, perhaps, taken to heart by the guys at the UN because since 2007 the robot census has been carried out privately by these guys, and last month they noted (pdf) that in the same approximate category of robots ("service robots for personal and private use") in 2009 the global population stood at "about 5.6 million units for domestic use and about 3.1 million units for entertainment and leisure...". That's a global population of 8.9 million robots, more than ten times what it was when the UN kicked off this survey in 2o04. Most of thjese, it notes (pdf), are vaccum cleaners and mowers, and many of them are merely toys, but it does include robots to assist the handicapped, robots for personal transportation and - slightly worryingly - robots for home security and surveillance.

Image from FlySi