Japan Leads in Robot Population

Robots live and work (and play) among us, but how many are there? The answer: a lot.

 Japan leads the pack with 295 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers. Singapore is a distant second with 169.

This graph only deals with manufacturing robots, and not Roombas, Terminators, R2 units, or Transformers.

In terms of work done, robots are mainly applied to the automotive industry, and their primary tasks are welding, soldering, and material handling. While many of us envision giant metal claws assembling stuff, "asembling and disassembling" only accounts for 13% of worldwide industrial robot tasks. They still require human overseers... for now.