The emergence of care robotics - A patent and publication analysis

The analysis rests on the PATSTAT patent and ISI Web of Science publication data. Bibliographic and network analyses are conducted on country, organization (i.e. universities and firms) and individual levels. We find that care robotics research and development activities constantly increased since the late 1970s. Today Japanese universities and firms are the most active players, while in early stages US and European organizations pioneered care robotics research. Starting from six disjunctive small networks, several highly interconnected care robotics research networks evolved. However, most cooperation clusters are still found within the same country. Only few international hubs emerged. Among them two arose around Japanese organizations (ATR, AIST) and Carnegie Mellon University, US.