EURON Report

JUNE 2006 110 many types of service robots for professional use. They are also produced for a mass market with completely different marketing channels. So far, service robots for personal and private use are mainly in the areas of domestic (household) robots, which include vacuum-cleaning and lawn-mowing robots, and entertainment robots, including toy and hobby robots. Sales of lawn-mowing robots have started to take off very strongly, with sales in excess of 46,000 units, and should continue to boom. The market potential is very large. Vacuum-cleaning robots were introduced on the market at the end of 2001. The market expanded rapidly in 2002–2004, and at least 1 million units have been sold. Of the 1.2 million robots for domestic household robots that were in use at 2004’s end, about 550,000 were installed in 2004.