The term “robot” is stretchy so maybe I want answer in separate definitions of the word, eg.
- proper robots: industrial, manufacturing, research machines that can largely operate on complex (as in composed of multiple steps) tasks without constant human interaction
- futuristic robots: humanoid or animal-like robots such as those made by Boston Dynamics or Tesla (you can include the dancing guy) or other companies
- toy robots: things that look like (most likely humanoid) robots but are just for kids.
But feel free to use another definition.
My motivation is that was just sipping my coffee thinking if there are more robots than humans already. Since AFAIK we’ve already been outnumbered by Lego people, I was wondering if we’ve also lost that fictional race.)
Probably hundreds of millions or billions if you include things like washing machines, dish washers, automated gates, garage openers, etc. that automate specific tasks. Just the read/write arms in hard disks alone is probably a staggeringly huge number, if we’re counting things like that…