Query the verified share of US manufacturing plants USING industrial robots — plus workers exposed and robotics capex — from the Census Industrial Robotic Equipment product (the first official federal robotics-adoption statistics).
Use this for "are factories actually adopting robots" questions — the INSTALLED-BASE reading the import data cannot see. Serves the percent of plants with robots and the percent of employees at plants with robots (both published as FRACTIONS of 1: 0.121 = 12.1%), Census's demeaned variants, and capital expenditures for robotic equipment ($1000) — by manufacturing industry (`naics_code`, 2/3-digit), by `state`, and by `plant_size` band. Filter by `edition` ("asm_2018_2021" = the ASM annual series; "ec_2022" = the 2022 Economic Census), `table` (the workbook sheet — exactly one of: "Percent of... NAICS", "Percent of... Geo", "Percent of... Geo demean", "Robot adopters vs not", "Robot adoption and plant size", "CapEx... NAICS", "CapEx... Geo", "CapEx and plant size"), `data_year` (2018-2022), `naics_code`, `state`, `plant_size`, or `geo_area_name` ("United States" for the national row). Group by any of `edition`, `table`, `naics_code`, `naics_title`, `state`, `plant_size`, `data_year`. Pass each parameter as a top-level key of `params` (flat — not nested under a `filter`, `filters`, or `where` key). Example: `{"table": "Percent of... Geo", "data_year": 2022, "group_by": ["state"], "order_by": "avg_pct_plants_with_robots", "top_n": 10}` for the most-automated states; `{"table": "Percent of... NAICS", "edition": "asm_2018_2021", "naics_code": "336", "group_by": ["data_year"]}` for transportation-equipment adoption over the ASM years. Returns JSON aggregates with citations and optional row-level records when `include_records` is true — every value cites its exact workbook cell-group, re-verifiable via get_source_evidence_v1.
THE ENGRAVED BOUNDARY: the two editions are NEVER spliced into one trend — the 2022 Economic Census reaches the small-plant universe the ASM sample does not (US plants-with-robots: 12.1% ASM-2021 vs 6.4% EC-2022 — a COVERAGE change, not a decline; every cross-edition scope carries an edition_scope note). Percents are INTENSIVE shares: avg/min/max over a scope, never summed. Capex sums UNDERSHOOT below the published totals wherever suppression bites (the published "United States" / "31-33" rows are the totals). Suppressed cells (D/S/A, decoded by the file's own footnotes) are null values with their verbatim letter — never zero; (s)-flagged estimates (standard error > 40%) carry their flag. Manufacturing plants only; adoption SHARES and capex, never robot counts (no official count of installed robots exists — the import unit-count series is query_robotics_trade_v1); an EXPERIMENTAL Census product (its own label); no edition after 2022 exists.