If you look at the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it's clear that robots have a huge role to play in advancing the SDGs. However the field of Sustainable Robotics is more than just the application area. For every application that robotics can improve in sustainability, you have to also address the question – what are the additional costs or benefits all the way along the supply chain. What are the'externalities', or additional costs/benefits, of using robots to solve the problem. Solving our economic and environmental global challenges should not involve adding to the existing problems or creating new ones.

The climate emergency brooks no compromise: every human activity or artefact is either part of the solution or it is part of the problem. I've worried about the sustainability of consumer electronics for some time, and, more recently, the shocking energy costs of big AI. But the climate emergency has also caused me to think hard about the sustainability of robots. And, I'm ashamed to say, very little robotics research is focused on the development of sustainable robots. A search on google scholar throws up a handful of excellent papers detailing work on upcycled and sustainable robots (2018), sustainable robotics for smart cities (2018), green marketing of sustainable robots (2019), and sustainable soft robots (2020).