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Methodology
How unit.report tracks intelligent machines.
What is tracked, how records are sourced, and what the labels mean. Coverage is not exhaustive and information can change.
What unit.report tracks
- Market. A broad intelligent-machine market: Robotics, Drones & Autonomous Aircraft, Intelligent Vehicles, or Smart Glasses & XR.
- Category. A type of machine or system within a market, such as Warehouse & Logistics Robots or Agricultural Drones.
- Company. An organization associated with tracked products or market activity. A company record says who the company is, where it is based, and its market presence. It does not imply a partnership with unit.report.
- Product. A specific machine, system or platform: a model, a model family, a driving system or a software-enabled system. Some products are not physical machines, and the page says what each one is.
- Signals and news. A signal is a dated, sourced record of one event. News is wider reporting, with the original source credited.
Coverage is a selection. A product or company that is not listed may still exist, and absence from unit.report is not absence from the market.
Categories and applications
A category says what type of machine or system a product is. An application says what job a product is documented to do, for example palletizing, welding, machine tending or crop spraying.
Applications are evidence-backed: a product is linked to an application only when a cited source documents it doing that job. A product with no listed application has not been documented for one yet, which is not the same as being unable to do it. The documentation is usually the manufacturer's own material, such as an official page or datasheet, rather than independent testing. Each application has a page that lists the tracked products documented for that job, and applications also appear on product and category pages.
Commercial status
Each product can carry a commercial status, recorded from current manufacturer information such as an official product page, catalog or announcement.
- Available. The manufacturer currently offers the product, for example by publishing a price, a purchase route or a quote request path.
- Limited. The product is offered on restricted terms, for example to selected customers, by inquiry, in small quantities or in some regions only.
- Preorder. The manufacturer is taking orders for a product that has not yet shipped.
- Announced. The manufacturer has announced the product but is not yet taking orders.
- Discontinued. The manufacturer has stopped offering the product. The page is kept as a reference record.
- Unknown. Current manufacturer information was not enough to say. Unknown is recorded instead of a guess.
What commercial status does not mean. It does not mean the product is in stock, sold at a displayed price, sold in every country, or sold by unit.report. A status can change after it is recorded. Check the cited source and the manufacturer for current terms.
Market metrics
A market metric is a sourced observation about measurable market activity, such as sales, shipments, deployments, fleet size, installed base, registrations or orders. Each one is shown with its period, its geography and its source.
Not every market or category has metrics, and the ones that exist are not directly comparable with each other: they measure different things over different periods in different places. A metric recorded for a market describes that market. It is not attributed to an individual product unless the product page itself shows it.
Sources and evidence
Records rely on sources in roughly this order of preference:
- Primary documents: manufacturer product pages and catalogs, company filings, regulator notices and the text of the rule itself.
- Independent reporting and data from established publishers and research providers.
- Other published material, used with care and marked as lower confidence where relevant.
The difference between a claim and evidence matters. A specification or availability statement that comes only from the manufacturer is recorded as the manufacturer's statement, with the manufacturer as the cited source. Independent evidence is used where it exists. Prefer the source shown on the page over any summary of it.
Market presence
unit.report records the market presence supported by its current evidence. A company may be shown as having an established U.S. presence, an established presence in another country, an applicable FCC restriction, or as unavailable. These labels describe the evidence currently recorded and may change as new information becomes available. Counts are live from the tracked companies.
Current evidence supports an established U.S. commercial, operational, distribution or other meaningful market presence.
Current evidence establishes the company's presence in the country shown, for example Established Japan Presence or Established Germany Presence. The label states only that presence.
One or more of the company's current product lines is subject to a 2026 FCC Covered List action on foreign-produced equipment and has no exemption: all foreign-produced drones and drone components (December 22, 2025), or foreign-produced ground-mobile robots such as humanoids, quadrupeds, warehouse robots and robot vacuums (July 28, 2026). The rules turn on where a product is made and its domestic content, not where the company is headquartered. Models the FCC authorized earlier remain sellable; new models cannot be authorized unless the product holds an exemption (the Blue UAS Cleared List, Buy American domestic end product status, or a Department of War or DHS Conditional Approval). Each company page states which lines are affected and cites the primary source.
The company has stopped selling, shipping or supporting the product line in question: discontinued, acquired and folded into another line, or wound down. Kept visible rather than deleted, so the record does not quietly disappear. This describes the company, not an individual product's commercial status.
A disclosed limit. Some company records, including the original companies in Drones & Autonomous Aircraft, come from a first research pass rather than the company-by-company verification described here, and do not yet have a source attached on their page. Their labels are a working draft until each is independently confirmed. The market pages say so too.
A company's label reflects its current product lines. Where a rule or exemption applies to a model differently, that model carries its own label, note and end date on its product page. Other regulatory rules or ownership considerations that apply to a company are described, with sources, in the notes on its page. Labels are research summaries, not legal determinations.
How a record is assigned and checked
No status is set from a press release alone, and none is set from a single weak source.
1
Primary sources first
Company filings, product and distributor pages, and regulatory notices. For regulatory labels, the order or rule itself, not a summary of it.
2
Cross-check
A claim that matters is compared against a second source where one exists, and recorded as the manufacturer's statement where it is the only source.
3
Date and cite
Records carry a verified date where one applies and link to their sources. A date shows when a record was last checked, not that it is still current.
4
Correct in the open
When something is reported wrong, it is fixed and the change is noted on the page rather than silently edited.
Independence and disclosure
unit.report is operated by UNITELO AI LLC, which also reviews sourcing requests and works with manufacturers, distributors and integrators. Those activities are separate from how records are set on this site.
A company's market-presence label is set by the process on this page, whether or not UNITELO has ever spoken with that company. A commercial relationship with UNITELO is not a reason to label a company differently.
- Companies with a UNITELO relationship carry an explicit line on their profile saying so.
- Everyone else is covered the way a trade publication covers a company it has no relationship with: sourced, dated and open to correction.
- Opinions are labeled as opinions.
What unit.report does not do
NO PAY-TO-LIST
A company does not need to pay, or even respond, to be listed. Coverage is not a membership benefit.
NO SPONSORED LABELS
Labels are not for sale and are not negotiable, including with companies UNITELO is talking to.
NO SILENT EDITS
Corrections and status changes are dated. A page's history is not quietly rewritten.
NO RANKINGS
Products and companies are listed alphabetically or by a stated filter, never by popularity or sales.
Corrections
To report an error, email hello@unitelo.ai with the page address, what is wrong and, if you have one, a source. See Contact.