Robot control and planning patents: where filing concentrates and where it still doesn't
17.1% of all activity sits with five filers. the top five assignees account for 2,041 of 11,910 records in scope, with the leader alone holding 898 — concentration, not fragmentation, at the top of this field. Filings rose from 655 in 2017 to a peak of 1,114 in 2022, then declined 34% from 1,023 in 2021 to 674 in 2024 — the last year with a complete publication window. 2025 and 2026 figures (down to 79 in 2026) are still filling in under the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication, so they should not be read as a continuing collapse.
- 1SEIKO EPSON CORP7.5%
- 2FANUC LTD2.9%
- 3OCADO INNOVATION LTD2.5%
- 4KAWASAKI JUKOGYO KK2.1%
- 5CANON KK2.1%
See the full robot control & planning patent landscape analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about the robot control patent landscape
Who holds the most patents in robot control and planning?
The dataset ranks 100 assignees across 11,910 records, and the leader alone holds 898 of them — close to 8% of the entire corpus. The gap to the field is steep: fifth place holds 249 records and tenth place 207, so the top five combined account for 2,041 records, 17.1% of everything in scope. Below the top ten the ranking flattens into a long tail, which is typical of a field with one or two dominant incumbents and many smaller specialised filers.
Is robot control patent filing growing or slowing down?
Filing rose steadily through the late 2010s, peaked at 1,114 records in 2022, and then fell 34% from 1,023 records in 2021 to 674 in 2024 — the most recent year with a publication window complete enough to trust. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that is expected: publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, so the newest years are always undercounted. Read the 2022 peak and the 2021–2024 decline as the reliable signal, not the raw numbers for the last one or two years.
What technology areas dominate robot control patents?
Manipulator and robot-arm mechanics, classified under IPC B25J, appear in 59.6% of the 11,910 records, making it by far the densest single class in the field. Control and regulating systems (G05B) follow at 17.5%, with surgical and diagnostic applications (A61B) at 13.4% and non-electric control variables (G05D) at 10.1%. Because a single record can carry several IPC classes, these percentages overlap rather than sum to 100%, but the ordering makes clear that most contested claim space sits in physical manipulator mechanisms rather than pure software control.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Robot Control & Planning Patent Landscape covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-08-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.