A guide to day two of RoboBusiness 2026

RoboBusiness 2026 will end today. After a busy first day at the 20th anniversary show, here’s everything you need to know about day two.

Day two of RoboBusiness will begin at 9:30 a.m. PT with the “State of Humanoids” panel. During this keynote, industry leaders will explore the capabilities that humanoids are offering today, the technical and operational challenges that remain, and the lessons that emerge from early industrial implementations. All major speeches 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, head of product management at Apptronik; Michael Patrick Perry, head of business strategy at Persona AI; Aadeel Akhtar, founder and CEO of PSYONIC. Mike Oitzman, senior editor of The robot reportwill host the panel.

The exhibitor hall will open at 10am and remain open until 3pm. Here participants will be able to find interesting robotics demos and the Startup Alley.

We will close RoboBusiness 2026 with a final keynote at 3pm Morgan Pope, company director of Familiar Machines & Magic, will lead a session on how the startup is creating robotic characters.

Registration for the show is available on the site.

Program of the morning break session

Breakout sessions will begin after the morning keynote and a short networking break. RoboBusiness 2026 sessions starting at 10.45am 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 speech will be held in room 203.
• China’s Physical AI Ecosystem in 2026: Competitor, Vendor, 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 a global perspective. The session will take place in room 207.
• An introduction to robotic tools for overhead power line operations: Trevor Anderson, FulcrumAir’s chief strategy officer, will review mobilisation, installation accuracy, live line capabilities and opportunities to complete the work without helicopters or disruptions required. The meeting will take place in room 209/210.
• Precision, Power, Perception: Enabling the Implementation of Next Generation Humanoids: Jordan Grotz, senior robotic systems engineer at Allegro MicroSystems, will explore critical technological advances 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 related to perception, decision making, and manipulation to create robots that can operate safely and predictably outside the lab. The session will take place in room 204.

Sessions starting at 11.45am include:

• Building scalable physical AI: Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of go-to-market physical AI at Arm, will examine the key computing principles underlying trusted physical AI, including how intelligence is deployed in cloud and edge computing and the coordination of learned and deterministic behaviors. It will also explain how developers can design systems that remain adaptable, reliable, and secure even when scaled up for production. The talk will be held in room 203.
• Reshoring with robots: a political discussion: This roundtable will include insights from Ellie Sakhaee, head of AI policy at Google; Dr. Henrik I Christensen, distinguished professor of computer science at UC San Diego; Brendan Schulman, vice president of policy and government relations at Boston Dynamics; and Michael Bearman, head of legal and security at Vecna ​​Robotics. The group will examine the need for a national robotics strategy and discuss industrial priorities. Eugene Demaitre, editorial director of The robot reportwill 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 meeting will take place in room 209/210.
• The dexterous hand: transmitting force and signal via synthetic tendons: Jim Hotary, vice president 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 bending cycles. Your session will be in room 206.
• Human-Robot Interaction: Bringing Academia and Industry Together: Fraz Yousuf, senior robotics applications engineer at Eli Lilly, will share what they’ve learned by performing HRI field studies with manufacturing and warehouse operators around operating AGVs, some early findings on people’s perception of robots in manufacturing, and the playbook they’ve built to make the partnership repeatable. This talk will take place in room 204.

RoboBusiness 2026 features more afternoon sessions

Breakout sessions starting at 2pm include:

• Troubleshooting real-time robots with AI agents and MCP: Rohit John Varghese, director of systems and product engineering at Contoro Robotics, will present 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 held in room 206.
• The ROI of Reality: Investing in the Physical Frontier of AI: David Sokolic, partner at Toyota Ventures, will explore what it takes to build, finance and scale intelligent physical systems. The presentation will be held in Room 207.
• How to Pick Winners in Robotics: Which Programs and Intellectual Property to Pursue and Why: Spencer Krause, president and CEO of SKA Robotics, discusses some of the methodologies Krause uses when evaluating the feasibility of a business case for robotics as well as whether or not to accept a partner’s commitment. It will be in room 209/210.
• The Intelligence Behind Warehouse Robotics: Scaling Operations with AI and Software: Jingwei Tan, senior systems consultant at Geek+, and Joe Kraft, director of systems 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 asset utilization and accelerating ROI. This RoboBusiness 2026 talk will take place in Room 204.