Must-Watch Robotics Stocks That Could Drive Future Growth Trends

An updated edition of the August 4, 2025, article.

The second half of 2025 has witnessed an unprecedented surge in robotics adoption across industries worldwide, driven by breakthrough AI integration and collaborative technologies that are fundamentally reshaping how businesses operate. International Federation of Robotics revealed over $16.5 billion in global industrial robot installations, with more than 4.28 million robots now operating in factories worldwide — a remarkable 10% increase from 2023. This has created transformative opportunities for players across every major sector, including UiPath PATH, Cadence Design Systems CDNS, NVIDIA NVDA and Advanced Micro Devices AMD.

Manufacturing leads this transformation with impressive growth statistics. North American robot orders increased 4.3% and revenues rose 7.5%, with companies purchasing 17,635 robots valued at $1.094 billion in the first six months of 2025, according to the Association for Advancing Automation report. In terms of units ordered, life sciences and pharmaceutical applications surged 8%, while plastics & rubber sectors expanded 9%. Automotive component manufacturing experienced an exceptional 34% surge, signaling industry confidence in automation's competitive advantages.

Healthcare robotics is experiencing remarkable momentum, with the global surgical robots market size estimated at $4.31 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $9.60 billion by 2033, witnessing a CAGR of 9.26% from 2025 to 2033. Over 8,000 da Vinci surgical systems by Intuitive Surgical ISRG now operate globally, while revolutionary partnerships like Swisslog Healthcare and Diligent Robotics are deploying autonomous delivery robots across 25+ U.S. hospitals. Elder care assistive robotics is experiencing particularly strong momentum, with market projections reaching $9.85 billion by 2033.

Defense and space applications have been showcasing remarkable achievements. The U.S. Air Force awarded Machina Labs a multi-year AI-enhanced robotics manufacturing contract in September 2025, while successful commercial lunar missions from Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines deployed multiple rovers, exceeding performance expectations. NASA's Perseverance rover made groundbreaking discoveries, identifying potential ancient biosignatures in Martian rock samples.

The collaborative robot market has exploded from $1.42 billion in 2025 to a projected $3.38 billion by 2030, experiencing transformative breakthroughs through AI integration. Universal Robots launched their AI Accelerator toolkit in October 2025, powered by NVIDIA-owned Isaac libraries, while Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute unveiled Large Behavior Models enabling humanoid robots to perform complex whole-body manipulation tasks autonomously.

Investment activity has reached historic levels, with more than $6 billion raised globally in robotics funding from January through July 2025. Figure AI's $1 billion Series C round at a $39 billion valuation exemplifies investor confidence in humanoid robotics' commercial potential.

Breakthrough developments in soft robotics, quantum-enhanced navigation systems, and 5G-enabled edge computing are enabling robots to operate in previously impossible environments. The convergence of AI, advanced materials, and collaborative design has created a new generation of adaptive robots capable of seamless human-robot interaction.

This rapid adoption reflects robotics technology reaching commercial maturity, addressing critical labor shortages while enhancing productivity, safety, and precision across virtually every industry sector globally.

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UiPath's 2025 robotics revolution positions the company as an exceptionally compelling investment opportunity, with the launch of its groundbreaking UiPath Platform for agentic automation in April 2025 representing a paradigm shift from traditional RPA to intelligent orchestration. This innovative platform uniquely integrates AI agents, robots, and human expertise through advanced orchestration capabilities, including UiPath Maestro, Agent Builder, and enterprise-grade governance frameworks, addressing the critical $50 billion addressable market for autonomous business process automation. Since the private preview launch in January 2025, the platform has demonstrated remarkable traction with thousands of autonomous agents created, over 75,000 agent runs, and 11,000+ Academy enrollments, signaling strong market adoption and customer confidence that should drive significant revenue acceleration and market share expansion throughout 2025 and beyond for this Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) company. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Cadence Design Systems emerges as a compelling robotics investment opportunity through its transformative €2.7 billion acquisition of Hexagon's Design & Engineering business in September 2025, strategically positioning the company at the forefront of the rapidly expanding robotics and physical AI simulation market. This landmark acquisition brings industry-standard multibody dynamics capabilities through Adams software, which plays a critical role in robotics applications where accurate simulation of real-world motion and interactions is essential for autonomous system development. This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company demonstrates strategic foresight in capturing the convergence of AI, robotics, and physical simulation technologies that will drive substantial growth opportunities throughout the emerging robotics ecosystem.

NVIDIA solidifies its leadership position in the transformative robotics revolution through groundbreaking 2025 advancements, including the launch of Isaac GR00T N1.5, the world's first open humanoid robot foundation model, and the general availability of Jetson Thor, delivering an unprecedented 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI compute power within a 130-watt envelope for real-time robotic reasoning. The Zacks Rank #3 company's comprehensive robotics ecosystem encompasses Isaac GR00T-Dreams synthetic data generation, which dramatically reduces training time from months to hours by creating vast amounts of synthetic motion data from minimal human demonstrations, addressing the critical data scarcity challenge in robotics development. With early adoption by industry giants, including Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Amazon Robotics, Figure, and Caterpillar, NVIDIA's three-computer cloud-to-edge platform enables the seamless development, simulation, and deployment of physical AI systems across manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and autonomous vehicles.

Advanced Micro Devices emerges as a compelling robotics investment opportunity through strategic 2025 initiatives, including a breakthrough collaboration between AMD Silo AI and Parallel Domain to optimize digital twin and simulation workloads for next-generation robotics applications on AMD Instinct GPUs, delivering unprecedented realism and scalability for AI-driven systems development. The Zacks Rank #3 company's comprehensive robotics ecosystem spans from the ROS-compatible Kria system-on-modules that accelerate AI-enabled factory solutions with low power consumption, to high-performance AMD Instinct MI350 series accelerators running sophisticated robotics models through the open ROCm 7.0 software stack. AMD's membership in the Digital Twin Consortium, coupled with cutting-edge Ryzen AI processors, enables seamless deployment of AI agents directly at the industrial edge, supporting autonomous manufacturing systems, surgical robotics, and collaborative automation platforms.

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