China now writes more of robotics. America still writes what everyone cites.

China now writes more of robotics. Its share of the papers at ICRA, one of the field's two flagship conferences, doubled from 15% in 2023 to 31% in 2026, while America's fell from 37% to 29%: in Vienna this year, China passed it. Across ICRA and IROS 2026, 20 of the 50 institutions leading the most papers were Chinese, against 15 American. Of the 29 US-led IROS papers that work with a named humanoid robot, 24 used a Chinese one, and Chinese-made robots were in 34% of the US-led papers that name their robot, American-made ones in 17%; a year earlier it was 20% and 27%.

America still writes what everyone cites. Of the 7,439 ICRA and IROS papers from 2022 to 2024, US-led ones were 32% and wrote 50% of the most-cited 1%. China-led papers were 19% of the papers and 20% of the most-cited 10%, so this is no paper mill: they are cited in line with their numbers, and better than Europe's.

So quality doesn't explain the stage. At the ten IROS and ICRA meetings whose speaker lists survive, researchers in China gave 20 of the 249 keynotes, 10 of them at home in Hangzhou; researchers in the US gave 87. Only 15% of China-led IROS 2026 papers got an 11-minute talk, against 44% of US-led and 43% of Europe-led ones, though Europe's papers are cited less than China's.

The tools are still mostly American too. Of the China-led papers we read in full that name one, 96% used an American simulator, 100% an American chip and 76% an American language model, though 50% also used a Chinese one, and US labs use Alibaba's Qwen too. Nearly one in five US-led papers acknowledges US defence funding; of those that name their robot, 11 of 34 used a Chinese-made one, 7 of them a Unitree. In June, after this work was done, the Pentagon listed Unitree as a Chinese military company, which bars it from defence contracts, not grantees from buying its robots.

Washington has noticed whose robots its labs work with. In July the FCC barred new models of foreign-made mobile robots, humanoids and quadrupeds included, though models already approved can still be sold, and a Senate bill would stop federal money being spent on Chinese ones, which could keep university labs on federal grants from buying them.

We traced 19,273 papers, from IROS and ICRA 2021 to 2026 (IROS 2023's program is lost and IROS 2024's partial), to where their first authors work, the rule The Economist uses; counted the citations of 7,439 papers from 2022 to 2024; and searched the full text of 2,857 for the robots, software, chips and funders behind them. The 26 charts below are interactive: switch the meeting, click any institution, or find your country's robotics groups.