Filing in this space is led by a mix of established industrial-robot manufacturers and Chinese universities, with no single assignee holding a dominant share of the 603 families in this dataset. The clearest pattern is jurisdictional rather than corporate: China accounts for 335 of the 603 records, far more than any individual company’s filing count. Recent-year momentum has also shifted, with some historically active industrial filers showing zero filings in the latest year while certain university groups show growth, so ‘who leads’ depends heavily on whether you weight by cumulative volume or by recent activity.

Not by filing volume — the trend peaked in 2021 at 71 families, sat at 64 by the 2022 midpoint, and has declined since, reaching 26 in the latest partial year. Because patent publication typically lags filing by about 18 months, the most recent one or two years will always look artificially low, so the true 2025–2026 filing rate is likely higher than currently visible. Even accounting for that lag, the multi-year trend from 2021 onward points to a field that has matured past its fastest growth phase rather than one still accelerating.

US12151379B2, granted to FANUC in November 2024, claims a method for motion planning on robots with a redundant degree of freedom, using a quadratic-programming formulation with a multi-component objective function and an explicit collision-avoidance constraint. Its distinguishing feature is that it avoids artificially constraining the redundant degree of freedom while still computing the plan efficiently enough for real-time execution at every control cycle. Anyone building a redundant-DOF collision-avoidance planner that also uses a real-time QP formulation should check this claim closely, since it was granted recently enough to remain fully enforceable.