The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to release a new brief drawn from the recent white paper Securing the Robotics Supply Chain: Technical Needs and Investment Opportunities for the Domestic Robotics Research Ecosystem. The brief, Key Recommendations for Securing the U.S. Robotics Supply Chain, outlines the sustained federal research and investment agenda needed to build a domestic robotics supply chain.
Federal action on robotics imports is underway, including the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) July addition of advanced robotic devices to its Covered List and an October 28 presidential proclamation on robotics and industrial machinery imports. The U.S. robotics research base, however, depends heavily on these supply chains, and restricting access before competitive domestic options exist risks raising automation costs and slowing the reshoring of manufacturing and logistics. Following these recommendations positions the United States to meet the security goals behind these actions while preserving researcher access to affordable platforms as domestic alternatives develop — thereby preserving American leadership in the future of robotics innovation.
Read Key Recommendations for Securing the U.S. Robotics Supply Chain
Recommendations in Three Areas
The brief organizes its recommendations into three areas:
- Technical research priorities: Systems that can be trusted even where the supply base remains partly foreign, supported by tools that verify trust, not just assume it, and shared, open-access test infrastructure.
- Federal investment opportunities: A conditioned pathway for research access, investment in the components that actually constrain supply rather than final assembly, and a coordinated federal approach, not a single-agency mandate.
- Education and workforce development: A domestic robotics supply chain is as much a workforce need as a manufacturing one, if not more, so the brief calls for building capacity across the entire pipeline, from K-12 through the doctorate.
The brief develops each recommendation with specific steps for researchers and federal agencies.
Read the Brief and Full White Paper
We encourage the entire computing community to read the new Key Recommendations Brief.
The recommendations in this brief draw on the CCC white paper Securing the Robotics Supply Chain: Technical Needs and Investment Opportunities for the Domestic Robotics Ecosystem, released in October 2026. The white paper was written by Cindy L. Bethel (University of Alabama), Henrik I. Christensen (University of California San Diego), Odest Chadwicke Jenkins (University of Michigan), George Pappas (University of Pennsylvania), and Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Amherst).
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This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award Nos. 2300842 and 2619366. These awards support the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a programmatic committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
