Need material handled? Boy, friend, have you come to the right place. The Georgia World Congress Center this week is teaming with folks champing at the bit to do just that, as we wind our way through another Modex. The show is a testament to how much has been happening in the warehouse automation space.
I like to spend a good chunk of day one walking the floor, seeing if I can sniff out any bigger trends among the booths. We’re still far from a humanoid invasion in 2026. The form factor continues to trickle in, but there weren’t any major, continuously operating demos in amongst the exhibitors.
The production version of Atlas is here this week, though it’s lurking in a dark corner of the Boston Dynamics booth, while Spot and Stretch run all the demos out in the open. Similarly, Agility has a Digit in its booth, though — like Atlas — it’s more for show. It’s a scaled-down presence from past events.
Kinisi’s robot is here, doing some light tasks at Bear Robotics’ booth, as the two companies share a cofounder. The humanoid is also mounted on top of Bear’s wheeled base, which has really accelerated the company’s roadmap. Dexmate had a quartet of wheeled humanoids rolling around its booth. A couple of feet away, Richtech had two of its own units out — though they weren’t doing anything to speak of when I passed by.
The real stars of the show are familiar names in the space. Locus once again had a massive booth, with its AMRs freely mingling alongside guests. Several of the new Array units were doing their thing in a walled-off demo area in the center of the booth. More information on that system can be found below via my recent interview with CEO Rick Faulk. Brightpick's very cool Gridpicker system was on full display -- which apparently isn't always a given.
HAI’s booth was… high. The company operates some massively tall shelving units. Automated storage and retrieval systems always make for a compelling show, and we got as much from AutoStore. I stopped by Symbotic’s booth to catch up with newish CTO James Kuffner, who I know from back in his TRI/Woven City days. You’ll find that conversation in next week’s newsletter, along with other Modex interviews, including the CEOs of Ambi Robotics and Gather AI.
Also, special shoutout to Pickle Robotics’ pickleball court. Synergy like that is too good to pass up. They did, however, skip the truck unloading demo, though plenty of companies — including BD — were there showcasing their own solution, like Anyware, Contoro, and Senad.
Dexory brought its massive inventory robot. Verily and Corvus both showcased their drone solutions to the same problem. Gather AI didn't have any drones present, though someone did park a forklift in their space, as the company is expanding its warehouse embodiments. Speaking of, autonomous forklifts were all over Hall A this year. You couldn't walk three feet without hitting one — figuratively, of course. No need to call OSHA.
“We don't have our head in the sand,” Rick Faulk notes. “I think at some point, humanoids may play a role doing certain things.” It’s not a concession from the CEO of an AMR powerhouse, so much as an acknowledgement that the much-hyped form factor may, eventually, find its place on warehouse and factory floors alongside Locus’s growing robot army.
“The question,” he quickly adds, “is what and how they can get an ROI for clients because that's what they're interested in. They're interested in, ‘Does it work? Is it safe? And can I get an ROI with that product?’ Eventually, humanoids may get there. I think over the next five years, it's going to be a big challenge.”
Activity at Locus HQ has hit a fever pitch as we sit down for our podcast interview. In a few hours, the company is hosting Boston’s regular Women in Robotics meetup in the same room our film crew is currently occupying. The real all-hands flurry, however, is Modex. Locus always has a big showing, but this year’s event is different. After teasing the product out for the better part of a year, the company is set to officially unveil its latest robotic system.
Until now, Locus Array has been relegated to private meetings, press teasers, and the occasional news piece. Monday’s Modex kickoff represents the official coming out party for the system, which marks a radical departure for Locus’s lineup. Up to now, the line has largely represented iterations on the standard AMR form factor, each revolving around a model wherein the robot autonomously navigates to a human associate who then picks an item off the shelf.
Array is designed to automate significantly more of the process – “reducing manual labor by 90%,” according to the company.
“These jobs and warehouses right now are very hard to fill for clients,” says Faulk. “Turnovers in some accounts are double digits a week. Any worker that we replace with Array will probably find another job within that warehouse. It could be in the packing function, receiving function, that sort of thing. Although we will be reducing labor with Array, for the most part, most every single one of those workers will find another job within the building.”
Andy Barry describes it as Generalist’s first “jaw on the floor moment.”
“We had taught the robot to pick this baggie up with the left hand and then like shake it,” the startup’s cofounder and CTO explains. “We were running the task and on one of the rollouts, it picked the baggie up with the right hand and shook it and did the task. We all stopped. We never taught it to do that.”
The staff Slack was overcome with messages of disbelief that the system had seemingly managed to make the jump on its own.
It was still early days for Generalist. The physical AI firm had yet to amass an unfathomable amount of code. The base was small enough, in fact, that chief scientist and fellow cofounder, Andy Zeng, used the downtime afforded him by a bout with the flu to watch every minute of the firm’s data collect up to that point. “He was sure that somebody had done it with the right hand,” says Barry.
“That was the first ‘wow’ moment where like there is something here that is just very different than what we have done before,” he adds. “We've seen many more moments like that, but that was kind of, that's burned in my memory because it was the first time and we all just didn't believe it.”
Generalist has similarly managed to capture public interest in the weeks following GTC. The firm chose NVIDIA’s developer conference to publicly debut its GEN-0 model. It was a noisy week, of course, leaving its demos buried among an avalanche of physical AI news. Ultimately, however, the young team didn’t have to wait too long. Rapid iterations showcased in viral videos have afforded the startup subsequent news cycles.
Aya Durbin drops two pieces of personal information before the podcast cameras start recording. The first is that a half-decade at 6 River Systems (acquired by Shopify in 2021) wasn’t enough to convince family members that she worked in robotics. Immediately after joining Boston Dynamics in 2023, and working on something more akin to the conceptual ideal, no further convincing was required.
Ask a layperson to close their eyes and picture a robot, the answer is likely to look less AMR, more Atlas.
The other bit Durbin shares is a self-described journey, as a “pragmatist turned dreamer.” The former is how she found herself in a product manager role at 6 River. The latter is apparently a thing that can happen to a person when they work at a place like Boston Dynamics long enough.
“I would say I'm a dreamer that still is a pragmatist at heart, but working at Boston Dynamics has definitely proven to me that the dreams can become valuable customer solutions,” Durbin explains. “Ultimately, that's why I'm a pragmatist, because I'm a product person. I care about delivering real value to customers that provides positive ROI. I don't believe that humanoids will ever become ubiquitous in society if we can't prove that.”
The conversation with Durbin was the last of a marathon of podcast episodes recorded in Boston last week. That may be part of the reason I’ve been reflecting on it as I walk the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center during Modex. It’s more than that, however. It’s seeing Boston Dynamics’ presence at this material handling trade show and reflecting on the circumstances that put it there, sandwiched between AMR booths.
One could say the company took a fairly circuitous route to the factory/warehouse floor. After 30 or so years building research robots, initially fueled by DARPA funding, the company finally determined it was time to sell product. That course correction occurred after BD switched hands from Google to Softbank, and has only accelerated since it’s become a part of Hyundai.
Google Tuesday announced the release of Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6. “We are bringing a new level of autonomy to the next generation of physical agents,” the DeepMind team writes in a post tied to the news. Updates to the model are primarily centered around spatial reasoning, task planning, and success detection — key elements for successful deployment of cross-embodiment robotics in the real world. Central to much of this reasoning is the concept of pointing. “Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 can use points as intermediate steps to reason about more complex tasks,” says Google. “For example, it can use points to count items in an image, or to identify salient points on an image to help the model perform mathematical operations to improve its metric estimations.” Another key update is instrument reading. That’s an important one for systems designed to monitor plants and other dangerous and/or remote environments. Relevant analog gauges, including thermometers, pressure gauges, and chemical sight glasses. The company cites its Boston Dynamics partnership — specifically its deployment of Spot for inspections — as a use case.
Pittsburgh-based physical AI firm Skild AI Wednesday night announced that it has acquired Zebra Technologies Robotics Automation. Zebra notably purchased Bay Area-based AMR firm, Fetch, for $209 million in 2021, an acquisition fueled by pandemic-driven e-commerce demand. Late last year, however, the logistics giant announced plans to wind down the division, citing a decision instead, “to further sharpen our strategic focus on digitizing and automating frontline workflows and on our investments in key growth areas.” Zebras notoriously do not fetch. Skild is, no doubt, right smack in the center of a massively growing category. The firm announced a whopping $1.4 billion raise in January. So, hey, why not pick up a robotics division or two? The firm cites the collection of real-world robot data as a major motivator, noting, "This will also accelerate our data flywheel and bring in more diverse data to train our omni-bodied brain." From the sound of the quotes attached to the news, the decision was largely a software one, as Skild looks to deploy its physical AI model as part of real-world workflows.
“Warehouse automation remains deeply fragmented today, with classical approaches falling short in most real-world scenarios — a fundamental barrier to achieving true operational efficiency,” says CEO Deepak Patha. “Tearing down and rebuilding warehouses to suit pre-programmed robots is simply not a viable economic solution. By combining Zebra's human-robot orchestration platform with Skild AI's omnibodied brain, we are set to transform what end-to-end automation looks like in warehouses that exist today. Zebra's orchestration layer brings humans into the fold alongside Skild AI's vision of 'any robot, any task, one brain' — turning warehouses into living symphonies of human and machine autonomy." Skild's focus has long been on cross-embodied deployment, with the creation of a model designed to be deployed across a broad range of robots, from humanoids to arms — and, of course, AMRs.
Path CEO Andy Lonsberry told me the company “see[s] all sorts of embodiments being useful, being productive, being powerful,” when we spoke a couple of weeks back. He also hinted that the company had more news on the horizon. It’s safe to say he was talking about Rove without really talking about it during that interview. At the time, he was pointing out that recently announced partnerships weren’t necessarily tied to the heavy, bolted-down systems we’ve seen from the past. The first steps into a world of automated welding mobility come by way of a customized version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, powered by Path’s Obsidian model, with a welding tool mounted on top.
“Obsidian has proven that physical AI can solve some of the hardest welding challenges inside the cell,” Lonsberry says in a release. “Rove is a significant next step and one our customers have been seeking. Manufacturers can now deploy Obsidian wherever welding is needed — across large assemblies, production sites, and in environments where moving the part isn’t an option.” Saronic is set to deploy Rove at its Franklin, Louisiana shipbuilding facility. The company tells me that Spot is "the starting point for platform potential," noting that Rove is designed to work across quadrupedal systems.
I promise I didn’t intend for this week’s newsletter to be so Boston Dynamics heavy. But you know what they say about the news: it’s always newsing. This little nugget comes by way of Kia’s 2026 Investor Day. Presumably part of the deal involved the company's executives getting to take some sweet photos with the robots like the above. The South Korean carmaker confirmed plans to deploy Atlas units at its AutoLand Georgia facility in West Point during the back half of 2029, with additional international rollouts to follow. That all follows the plan to deliver the humanoids to Hyundai’s Ellabell, Georgia Metaplant America in 2028, which the auto giant announced back at this year’s CES. In addition to owning Boston Dynamics outright, the Hyundai Motor Group has controlled Kia since snapping up 51% of the company in the late-90s. Vertical integration, folks!
New work out of MIT Lincoln Laboratories this week is proving that humans and underwater AUVs can be friends, after all. The research aims to pair man and machine for underwater missions, playing to both parties’ respective strengths. "Divers and AUVs generally don't team at all underwater," says researcher Madeline Miller. "Underwater missions requiring humans typically do so because they involve some sort of manipulation a robot can't do, like repairing infrastructure or deactivating a mine. Even ROVs are challenging to work with underwater in very skilled manipulation tasks because the manipulators themselves aren't agile enough." Much of the work has been carried out around New England, including the ocean off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the Charles River in MIT’s native Boston. Additional research was carried out at Michigan Technological University's Great Lakes Research Center over the summer.
Researchers at New York State’s Binghamton University have paired robot quadrupeds with large language models to create automated guide dogs that can carry on conversations with visually impaired humans while leading the way. The robot dog kicks things off by asking the user where they want to go before presenting possible routes with estimated travel time for each. Once a path is selected, the guidance begins, with the system alerting its human to the presence of obstacles along the route. “Real dogs can understand around 20 commands at best, associate professor Shiqi Zhang, says of the work. “But for robotic guide dogs, you can just put GPT-4 with voice commands. Then it has very strong language capabilities.”
As of Wednesday, Unitree is selling its R1 humanoid in the U.S. by way of AliExpress. Reports earlier this week put the cost in the $4,000 USD range, but import charges being what they are these days puts the two configurations at $7,025 and $8,389 as of this writing. It’s a substantial markup but still very much on the low end of the humanoid price spectrum. I wouldn’t expect too much in the way of ROI here. Unitree’s systems aren’t built for work, but the company has found a good bit of success selling to the rapidly expanding robot research market. The U.S. product availability arrives amid rumors that the Hangzhou firm is set for a China IPO.
Ali Kashani (Serve Robotics) - Serve's CEO on the journey from DoorDash experiment to Uber spinoff to delivery powerhouse.
Zachary Jackowski (Boston Dynamics) - January's Atlas product launch required a ground-up rethinking from Jackowski's team at Boston Dynamics.
Ranjay Krishna (Ai2/UW)- Ai2 researcher/University of Washington assistant professor, Ranjay Krishna, discusses the power of training robots in simulation.
The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) is North America’s largest automation trade association representing more than 1,400 organizations involved in robotics, artificial intelligence, machine vision & imaging, motion control & motors, and related automation technologies.
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