Artificial intelligence has been a dominating topic inside and outside of the robotics industry in recent years. Physical AI, or integrating AI with hardware, enables autonomous machines to perceive, understand, and perform complex actions in the real world.
The 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 27 and 28 in Boston, will feature an entire session track focused on AI. This track will include:
- Building Scalable Robot Systems That Learn, Adapt, and Earn Trust: John Black, the chief technology officer at Brain Corp, will explore how new approaches in perception, data integration, and continuous learning are redefining autonomy in real-world environments like retail, logistics, and public spaces.
- Building the Data Flywheel for AI-Native Robots: This panel discussion will include insights Nic Fischer, the CTO of Agtonomy; Axel Krieger, the chief robotics officer and co-founder at Semaphor Surgical; Benji Barash, the co-founder and CEO of Roboto AI; and Mike Oitzman, a senior editor at The Robot Report.
- Let’s Build an Embodied AI Robot Together: Chris Matthieu, the vice president of the developer ecosystem at RealSense, will build an embodied AI experience live on stage.
- Physical AI Showcase: Marita McGinn, the director of growth at MassRobotics, will be introducing the startups from MassRobotics’ Physical AI Fellowship.
- When Language Moves Machines: The Future of Physical AI: Rachita Chandra, a prototyping solutions architect at AWS, will walk through how user intent expressed in plain language is translated into structured plans, tool calls, and robot actions—bridging large language models with perception, navigation, and actuation.
- Building Large Behavior Models for Industry: In this keynote talk, Russ Tedrake will share his vision for how physical AI can unlock more capable, adaptable robots across industries.
- Accelerating Industrial Robotics Applications with AI: YJ Lim, a principal technical product lead at MathWorks, will teach attendees how to design end-to-end workflows that incorporate deep learning, reinforcement learning, transformer-based vision-language-action (VLA) models all within a single, simulation-driven platform.
- Attention Please: A New Front End for Robot Conversation: Enzo Ruedas, a machine learning engineer at NXP Semiconductors, will highlight the architectural principles that make scalable, real-time conversational robotics feasible on embedded platforms.
- MassRobotics Form & Function Challenge Finals: During this session, led by Russell Nickerson, the partner engagement liaison at MassRobotics, will announce the winner of its third Form and Function Challenge.
- Which Comes First: the Data or the Robot?: Roch Nakajima, the CMO at Noitom Robotics, will share why the AI winners won’t just buy hardware—they’ll start collecting data now, design privacy-by-default pipelines, and treat models as strategic IP.
- Rebuilding the Robotics Developer Experience: Andrew Stout, a roboticist and machine learning engineer at the AI Institute, will share insights from the Robotics and AI Institute’s DevExp and build system overhaul: a project with a scope spanning from repository organization, to polyglot build systems with caching and remote build execution, ROS integration, management of dependencies, all the way to runtime tools, deployment, and migration–for an organization consisting of many different robotics research and engineering teams with diverse needs.
- Embracing Open Source for the AI & Robotics Revolution: Brian Gerkey, the CTO of Intrinsic, will give an overview of the current state of open source in robotics and artificial intelligence.
- Productionizing AI in Robotic Systems: This panel will feature insights from Anders Beck, the VIP of AI Robotics Products at Universal Robots, Dave Coleman, the founder and chief product officer at PickNik Robotics, Andy Lonsberry, the CEO at Path Robotics, and Mike Oitzman, senior editor at The Robot Report.
Register for the Robotics Summit & Expo today
Registration is now open for the Robotics Summit & Expo, the world’s leading technical event for commercial robotics developers. The event is produced by The Robot Report and WTWH Media.
The show will have more than 50 sessions in tracks on artificial intelligence, design and development, enabling technologies, healthcare, and logistics. The Engineering Theater on the show floor will also feature presentations by industry experts.
More than 70 speakers are confirmed from companies such as Fictiv, Harmonic Drive, maxon, PickNik Robotics, RealSense, Robust AI, Tesla, Toyota Research Institute, and more.
The Robotics Summit will also feature a number of networking opportunities. They include a Mix & Mingle Networking Reception after the first day of the show and the ticketed RBR50 Awards Dinner.
The Robotics Summit & Expo is co-located with DeviceTalks Boston, which focuses on medical devices.
Tell Us What You Think!