Robotics research is advancing at an increased pace. The global Covid-19 pandemic further increased the need for robotization of processes worldwide. This work aimed to characterise recent trends in robotics research and development (R&D) to direct efforts both in academia and industry. Emerging and declining hot topics were identified by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of scientific sources and reports from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and a bibliometric analysis of keywords co-occurrence in leading robotic conferences. Two-time frames (2010–2011, 2020–2021) were compared using the VOSviewer tool. Major increases, decreases, and new entries of robotic topics were identified, leading to the establishment of a keywords chart comparing trends between the two periods. Word clouds analysis was conducted on reports by IFR. The main findings from the keywords chart indicate that artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction (HRI) are major trends. A decrease in tangible keywords (e.g., “locomotion”) was identified along with an increase in “equationless” and less tangible keywords (e.g., “social robotics”). The IFR sources pinpointed additional trends (e.g., “semantic intelligence” and “swarm robotics”). The combination of scientific and representative market data sources highlights robotic R&D trends from different perspectives. In the future, more sources (e.g., patents) and text-mining techniques should be added to identify additional trends in robotics.