The industry-led ADRA Strategic Research, Innovation and Deployment Agenda championed a 'Physical AI' funding track across the European Union through the Horizon Europe innovation funding program. It is one of three robotics roadmaps that illustrate how a written plan can move public money. The other two are the US National Robotics Roadmap and Made in China 2025. Each came from a different kind of author, and each aimed at a different audience.
A new monthly series now sets out to examine such documents country by country. Its first installment explains what a roadmap is, who writes one, and why working roboticists have a stake in the result.
Three roadmaps, three kinds of author
The US National Robotics Roadmap is described as a bottom-up, academic-led effort. Its purpose is to encourage major government investment in innovations in collaborative robots. A recent edition, titled A Roadmap for US Robotics: Robotics for a Better Tomorrow, was published in April 2024 by UC San Diego, the Computing Community Consortium and the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance. An earlier retrospective on the National Robotics Initiative appeared in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine in September 2019.
The ADRA agenda comes from industry. Its 2025-2027 edition was written by Fredrik Heintz, Nabil Belbachir and Edward Curry and issued in Brussels in February 2024. The document is credited with winning the Physical AI funding track inside Horizon Europe.
Made in China 2025 is a government plan. The State Council of the People's Republic of China published it in 2015, and it includes robotics development goals. It is credited with helping move China from low-cost workshops to a global high-tech leader over the course of a decade.
Influential roadmaps, the series notes, are often written by combinations of academia, industry and government. Mixed authorship lets a document reflect several perspectives and propose objectives within realistic constraints.
Why roboticists are asked to engage
The series argues that robots are already embedded in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture and transportation, and that investment in robotics is a national priority in many countries. It describes a global race to build robots that physically embody artificial intelligence. That race is expected to affect labor markets, immigration, the military, commerce and education.
Within that setting, the authors say roboticists should understand the stakeholders around their work. Researchers can advise policymakers on how viable their field is and which sectors it could transform. Government support then lets universities and companies advance their technology, and it can reassure private investors who are considering bets on related businesses. The stated aim is to speed up innovation where society needs it most.
The authors also frame this as a duty of the research community. They pose three questions: what robots should do in ten years, who the end users should be, and what resources are needed to carry technology into the real world. They acknowledge that these questions feel distant from day-to-day lab work.
Mostly national, rarely shared
Roadmaps take different forms depending on the reader. A federal action plan can direct research institutions and encourage investors to back an industry. A paper drafted by a coalition of experts can instead act as a beacon for innovators and build a common vision.
Internationally collaborative efforts exist. One is A Road Map for Responsible Robotics: Promoting Human Agency and Collaborative Efforts, by D. Araiza-Illan and colleagues, published in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine in December 2025. Most robotics roadmaps, however, are country-specific. Each reflects priorities shaped by economics, geopolitics and cultural values.
The same tool can serve different ends. A streamlined robotics agenda can help one country rise in the global value chain. For another, it may start the innovation needed for technological sovereignty, which the authors call particularly critical when digital transformation can shift the global order.
What the series will cover
Each month's installment will focus on one country and its robotics agenda. Planned topics include the priorities and strategies of leading countries' roadmaps, their intended readers and outcomes, and the influence of geopolitical tension on strategy. Readers are invited to send feedback to the organizers.
Analysis: what the evidence supports and what it does not
The three examples share a feature that matters for the field. They show that robotics roadmaps work as instruments of persuasion aimed at funders, and not only as technical forecasts. The ADRA case is the clearest. A document produced by industry ended up tied to a named funding track. That gives researchers a concrete model: a written agenda, aimed at a specific funding program, can change what gets financed.
The comparison across the three is less tidy than it looks. An academic roadmap seeking government money, an industry agenda seeking a funding track, and a state plan backed by the government that issued it operate under very different conditions. The US and EU documents ask for support. The Chinese plan came from the body that controls the resources. Their results should not be ranked as if they were the same kind of effort.
Several points remain unproven. The source credits each roadmap with an outcome, but it gives no figures for funding amounts, timelines or counterfactuals. It does not show that the plans caused the results instead of recording policy already moving in that direction. The China attribution covers a decade in which many other factors were at work. The three cases are also all successes, so failed or ignored roadmaps are not examined.
The planned country-by-country format could fill part of that gap, provided it reports what each plan asked for and what was delivered. For now, the practical conclusion is narrow. Robotics roadmaps are a documented route from lab-level ideas to public funding, and the field's own researchers are being asked to take part in writing them. Whether that participation improves the allocation of investment is a question the series has not yet tested.