RoboBusiness 2026 will come to an end today. After a packed first day of the 20th anniversary show, here is everything you need to know about Day 2.
The second day of RoboBusiness will start at 9:30 a.m. PT with the “State of Humanoids” panel. During this keynote, industry leaders will explore the capabilities humanoids are delivering today, the technical and operational challenges that remain, and the lessons emerging from early industrial implementations. All keynotes will take place in the theater on the second floor.
This panel will include insights from Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer of Agility Robotics; Parker Conroy, the head of product management at Apptronik; Michael Patrick Perry, head of commercial strategy at Persona AI; Aadeel Akhtar, the founder and CEO of PSYONIC. Mike Oitzman, senior editor at The Robot Report, will host the panel.
The Exhibitor Hall will open at 10:00 a.m. and stay open until 3:00 p.m. There, attendees can find interesting robotics demos and the Startup Alley.
We’ll be closing RoboBusiness 2026 with a final keynote talk at 3:00 p.m. Morgan Pope, the director of companionship at Familiar Machines & Magic, will lead a session on how the startup is creating robotic characters.
Registration for the show is available on site.
Morning breakout session schedule
Breakout sessions will start after the morning keynote and a short networking break. RoboBusiness 2026 sessions starting at 10:45 a.m. include:
- Egocentric Robot Learning: Teaching Robots Through Human Experience: Ted Larson, co-founder and CEO of OLogic, will explore the foundations of egocentric robot learning, the technical challenges involved in building these systems, and their implications for the future of commercial robotics. His talk will be in Room 203.
- China’s Physical AI Ecosystem in 2026: Competitor, Supplier, Benchmark: Georg Stieler, managing director for Asia at Stieler Technology, will share the latest insights from his company’s work on the ground in China and put them into global perspective. The session will be in Room 207.
- An Introduction to Robotic Tools for Overhead Power Line Operations: Trevor Anderson, the chief strategy officer at FulcrumAir, will examine mobilization, installation precision, live-line capabilities and opportunities to complete work without helicopters or required outages. The talk will take place in Room 209/210.
- Precision, Power, Perception: Enabling Next-Gen Humanoid Actuation: Jordan Grotz, senior robotics systems engineer at Allegro MicroSystems, will dissect the critical technological advancements that are making next-generation robotic actuation possible. He will speak in Room 206.
- Why Physical AI Fails in the Real World: This panel will include insights from SK Gupta, co-founder and chief scientist of GrayMatter Robotics; Brian Geisel, founder and CEO of Geisel Software & Symage; and Sparsh Gautam, a computer vision engineer at Tesla. They will discuss how teams are addressing challenges across perception, decision-making, and manipulation to create robots that can operate safely and predictably outside the lab. The session will be in Room 204.
Sessions starting at 11:45 a.m. include:
- Building Physical AI that Scales: Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of go-to-market physical AI at Arm, will examine key compute principles behind trusted physical AI, including how intelligence is distributed across cloud and edge compute and the coordination of learned and deterministic behaviors. He will also explain how developers can design systems that remain adaptable, reliable, and safe as they scale to production. The talk will be in Room 203.
- Reshoring With Robots: A Policy Discussion: This panel discussion will include insights from Ellie Sakhaee, an AI policy manager at Google; Dr. Henrik I Christensen, a distinguished professor of computer science at UC San Diego; Brendan Schulman, vice president of policy and government relations at Boston Dynamics; and Michael Bearman, the chief legal and safety officer at Vecna Robotics. The group will examine the need for a national robotics strategy and debate industrial priorities. Eugene Demaitre, editorial director for The Robot Report, will moderate this session in Room 207.
- SparkE-B: Building a Robot for Safer Electrical Work: Yakov Bobrov, co-founder and chief technology officer of Hardhat Robotics, will explore the challenges of deploying robots in dynamic construction environments, the engineering behind safety-critical robotic systems, and how AI-enabled autonomy could help skilled tradespeople dramatically increase productivity. The talk will take place in Room 209/210.
- The Dexterous Hand: Delivering Force and Signal via Synthetic Tendons: Jim Hotary, VP of technology at Maeden Innovation, will examine key engineering challenges including fatigue life, creep, abrasion resistance, friction management, routing constraints, and reliability under millions of flex cycles. His session will be in Room 206.
- Human-Robot Interaction: Bridging Academia and Industry: Fraz Yousuf, a senior robotics application engineer at Eli Lilly, will share what they learned running HRI field studies with manufacturing and warehouse operators around live AGVs, some early findings of people’s perception of robots on the manufacturing floor and the playbook they built to make the partnership repeatable. This talk will take place in Room 204.
RoboBusiness 2026 features more afternoon sessions
Breakout sessions starting at 2:00 p.m. include:
- Real-Time Robot Troubleshooting with AI Agents and MCP: Rohit John Varghese, the director of systems engineering and product at Contoro Robotics, will give an introduction to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and then show examples on a real industrial robot deployed in a warehouse. The talk will be in Room 206.
- The ROI of Reality: Investing in the Physical AI Frontier: David Sokolic, a partner at Toyota Ventures, will break down what it takes to build, fund, and scale intelligent physical systems. The presentation will be in Room 207.
- How to Pick Winners in Robotics: What Programs and IP to Pursue and Why: Spencer Krause, the president and CEO of SKA Robotics, go through some of the methodologies that Krause uses when evaluating the viability of a business case for robotics and also whether or not to accept a partner engagement. It will be in Room 209/210.
- Intelligence Behind Warehouse Robotics: Scaling Operations with AI & Software: Jingwei Tan, a senior system consultant at Geek+, and Joe Kraft, the director of system consulting at Geek+, will examine how software, not just hardware, enables organizations to expand from a single automated workflow to enterprise-scale warehouse operations, while reducing complexity, improving resource utilization, and accelerating ROI. This RoboBusiness 2026 talk will take place in Room 204.
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