The Sustainability Gap in Robotics: A Large-Scale Survey of Sustainability Awareness in 50,000 Research Articles
Antun Skuric, Leandro Von Werra, Thomas Wolf

TL;DR
This large-scale survey analyzes nearly 50,000 robotics research papers to assess the extent of sustainability awareness and motivation, revealing significant gaps between potential and actual emphasis on sustainability and SDGs.
Contribution
It provides the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of sustainability mentions and SDG alignment in robotics research literature.
Findings
Sustainability mentions are below 2% in papers.
Explicit SDG references are below 0.1%.
Less than 5% of papers are explicitly motivated by sustainability.
Abstract
We present a large-scale survey of sustainability communication and motivation in robotics research. Our analysis covers nearly 50,000 open-access papers from arXiv's cs.RO category published between 2015 and early 2026. In this study, we quantify how often papers mention social, ecological, and sustainability impacts, and we analyse their alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The results reveal a persistent gap between the field's potential and its stated intent. While a large fraction of robotics papers can be mapped to SDG-relevant domains, explicit sustainability motivation remains remarkably low. Specifically, mentions of sustainability-related impacts are typically below 2%, explicit SDG references stay below 0.1%, and the proportion of sustainability-motivated papers remains below 5%. These trends suggest that while the field of robotics is advancing…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
