From Programmed Machines to Generalist Agents: Enabling Technologies and the Future of Service Robotics

Service robots are leaving the caged, deterministic world of industrial automation and entering unstructured, human-centred environments. This survey argues that the central transition of the next decade is from machines programmed for fixed tasks to systems that perceive, reason and adapt, and that the pace of this transition is limited less by algorithms than by robustness, safety certification and economics. Introducing the IFR/ISO classification and a short market snapshot, review the enabling technologies (3D perception, learning-based control and sim-to-real transfer, vision-language-action models, dexterous manipulation, navigation, human-robot interaction and safety standards, hardware, and cloud/teleoperation infrastructure), and analyse two sectors in depth (agriculture and healthcare) and several more briefly. We then discuss economic, regulatory, social and ethical factors, with emphasis on the European regulatory landscape, and close with a critical 5-to-10-year outlook that separates what is probable, what is plausible, and what is currently hype.