Top Three States Leading the Way in the Robotic Revolution

If we asked you where in the USA industrial robotics were most prominent, what would your first answer be? Silicon Valley? Austin? The North Carolina Research Triangle?

“The industrial and agricultural Midwest” isn’t the first answer coming to your mind — but it’s the right answer.

We love to talk about AI and automation in this newsletter, and one of the spaces in which automation has been making waves for decades is robotics. Industrial robotics don’t always seem quite as cutting-edge as generative AI or machine learning, but we’re still seeing huge advances in what can be accomplished using robotics.

This week we’re looking at three Midwestern states leading the way with robotics — in the manufacturing, automotive, and agricultural sectors.

Iowa: Embracing Robotics in Manufacturing

Non-Iowans don’t typically think of this midwestern state as a technology center. (Neither do many Iowans!) But a recent survey from the US Census Bureau found that Iowa leads the way in the percentage of manufacturing plants using industrial robots, with 18.6 percent.

Iowa City, in particular, emerges in the research as a robotics hub — not a location that produces numerous robots, but a place that integrates them at a substantial clip.

A wide-ranging Bloomberg report divides “robot hubs” into two categories: suppliers and integrators. “Suppliers” loosely refers to the companies innovating, researching, and producing industrial robots, while “integrators” includes the businesses that purchase and use those robots as well as those who do the integrating (e.g., taking a range of robotics solutions from various manufacturers and creating a cohesive solution out of them).

Iowa City enjoys a range of advanced manufacturing as well as medical technology powering parts of its economy, and both of these sectors benefit from industrial robotics.

Michigan: Driving Innovation in Robotics

The Detroit area, with its legacy of automotive manufacturing, leads the overall robotics race with 66 establishments supplying or integrating robotics, per Bloomberg. This is a stunning figure compared to the greater Chicago metropolitan statistical area (MSA), which has more than double the population and a manufacturing-heavy history, but just 42 robotics firms. Even the Boston MSA, home to MIT and all sorts of advanced robotics research, has just over half as many robotics firms as Michigan.

It's no surprise that robotics are in frequent use within automotive manufacturing, but the growing scope and scale of their use has some researchers and policy types raising eyebrows. As great as the development of new robotics technologies may be, it isn’t necessarily delivering the advancements in high-paying jobs that were expected.

In other words, some commentators are concerned that robotics advances are cannibalizing more blue-collar labor and that the new jobs created aren’t producing the wage gains they were expected to.

Kansas: Harnessing Robotics for Agricultural Advancements

Some of the most exciting developments in industrial robotics are happening in agriculture.

Farmers in Kansas are using agricultural robots from makers like Greenfield Robotics to mow crops, weed fields, and more.

Some of the most cutting-edge robots use advanced IR systems to “see” weeds and pests, then use lasers to burn them up before they can do damage. Compared to current systems involving significant amounts of pesticides and herbicides, this new technology has the potential to increase efficiency and yields while reducing reliance on potentially damaging chemical compounds.