Methodology

The best source depends on the field. A manufacturer’s store page may give the best current price, while its technical manual is more reliable for rated payload. RobotCosts uses a separate source order for each kind of information.

Price and availability

1. Manufacturer store or checkout page
2. Manufacturer product page
3. Authorized distributor
4. Structured product feed
5. Retailer, then marketplace
6. News reporting, only where nothing above exists

Technical specifications

1. Manufacturer technical documentation and manuals
2. Manufacturer developer documentation
3. Manufacturer product page, then store page
4. Authorized distributor
5. News, then independent community testing

Developer capability and measured performance

RobotCosts checks developer documentation first for SDKs, APIs and other developer features. Product pages describe what a robot does; developer portals describe what you can build with it. For measured performance, such as battery life under load, independent testing takes priority. The measured figure appears beside the rated figure instead of replacing it.

When two sources of the same rank disagree and the field allows only one value, the conflict is recorded and the record is held for review instead of publishing a guess.

RobotCosts records when each price, specification and availability status was checked, and shows that date with the value. A record is rechecked on a 120-day cycle; past that window it is marked as due for a recheck rather than quietly presented as current.

A robot reaches a public page only after an editor reviews its sources or an automated check matches every cited excerpt to the live source. The record must cover price status, availability and at least 5 specifications.

Verified

Stated by the manufacturer

Confirmed

Stated by an authorized seller

Reported

Reported by a secondary source

Estimated

Calculated by RobotCosts

Starting prices

A “from” price is recorded as a starting price and labelled as one everywhere it appears. It is never presented as the price of the robot as configured in the photograph, and it is never silently upgraded to a list price.

Shipping, tax and duties

Whether a price includes shipping or tax is recorded as stated by the seller and shown as a qualification beneath the figure. Where the seller does not say, RobotCosts does not assume: the qualification is absent rather than invented. Import duties are never included, because they depend on a destination the site does not know.

Currency

Prices are stored in the currency the seller quoted. Figures in different currencies are never averaged and never converted for the purpose of a statistic, because a conversion introduces a rate and a date that were not observed. A category distribution is computed within a single currency and says so.

Quote-only and undisclosed prices

Most commercial robotics is sold by quote. When there is no public price, the page says “Quote required” or “No public price.” It never shows a zero, a blank, or an estimate as an observed price. That status reflects how the robot is sold.

Lease, subscription and used prices

Lease, rental, subscription and used prices are recorded and shown, but they are kept distinct from a one-time purchase price and are excluded from purchase-price statistics. A monthly figure and an outright price are not the same number.

A category distribution uses one representative price per model, so a manufacturer shipping twenty variants cannot move a median. Distributions are published only at 10 or more compatible prices; below that the page describes the available models instead. Manufacturer pages need 2 models and category pages need 8 models before they can appear in search results.

• No ratings, reviews or stars. RobotCosts does not collect or display customer reviews, ratings or stars, and it does not emit rating structured data.
• No unsupported summaries. A robot page summarizes only fields that it also shows with sources. When few fields have sources, the summary is short or absent.
• No interpolated history. Price history is a list of dated readings. No line is drawn between two observations, because the days in between were not observed.
• No merchant claims. RobotCosts is an editorial aggregator, not a seller, and does not identify itself to search engines as a seller for these products.

Every robot page has a correction form. A report identifies the field, what the correct value is and where it can be verified. Corrections that come with a source are checked first. Accepted corrections update the record and appear in that robot’s change log with the date.

Manufacturers and distributors who want a price updated should use the same form; there is no separate channel, and no commercial relationship changes how a correction is handled.

Rights-cleared images are preferred and keep their original license and creator credit. Where no cleared image is available, RobotCosts may use official manufacturer imagery editorially to identify the product. Those assets are marked as having unknown rights, linked to their source, credited to the manufacturer and removed on a substantiated request. Attribution records the source; it does not claim that permission was granted.

Some outbound seller links may carry affiliate tracking. Those links are marked in the interface and tagged rel="sponsored nofollow" in the markup.

Commission never influences which offer is shown as the headline price. Offer ranking uses evidence quality, seller authorization and whether the item can be ordered, in that order. Commercial terms do not affect the ranking. If an affiliate offer and a better-supported non-affiliate offer disagree, the better-supported offer wins.

See also the source policy and about RobotCosts.