Collaborative robot arm manufacturers could soon see rising revenue by supplying their products to humanoid robot developers, according to a study from Interact Analysis.
While the near-term revenues of that new sales channel remain modest, the long-term upside could be huge, potentially adding 10% to 30% to cobot vendors’ revenues by 2030. That growth would come as humanoid robot revenue could reach $15 billion by 2030, the firm says.
The forecast implies that what began as occasional component sales is evolving into a structural trend for the cobot industry, the report said. For cobot vendors, the change would be a logical, low risk extension of their core technology, offering a promising secondary growth avenue without immediately cannibalizing existing cobot business.
According to Interact Analysis, recent months have seen a surge in cobots sold to humanoid makers. These are volume purchases, not small-scale evaluations, indicating that humanoid developers increasingly rely on mature cobot technology to accelerate their roadmaps. That strategy allows humanoid makers to bypass years of internal R&D by purchasing cobot grade actuators, force sensors, and control architecture that are already industrially proven.
Another driver of that trend is that a significant portion of new entrants to the humanoid robot market are AI-focused companies founded by researchers from leading AI labs. They possess strong algorithms but have no prior robotics hardware experience or established manufacturing. And building an in-house supply chain from scratch is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Therefore, they outsource the necessary hardware; upper bodies such as arms and hands to cobot vendors, and lower bodies such as mobility bases to AGV or AMR suppliers.
However, the biggest impact could be overseas. While both China and the United States have humanoid production capabilities, only China possesses a fully integrated collaborative robot (cobot) manufacturing ecosystem and a mature supply chain. This unique advantage allows Chinese cobot manufacturers to capture demand benefits from the humanoid robotics boom right from the start—whereas the U.S., despite having production, lacks the same end‑to‑end industrial readiness.
