The 2026 Robotics Summit & Expo opened Wednesday morning at the Menino Convention Center in Boston, 5,000 attendees, 200 exhibitors, and a keynote panel titled “The State of Humanoids” that included people from Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Schaeffler, RealSense, and ASTM International. The framing of the panel is the part to notice. Two years ago this would have been a panel about whether humanoids could ever do useful work. This year it is a panel about supply chains, throughput, and who is going to own the actuator stack.
The new numbers landing into the show:
- Agility Robotics’ Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes in live commercial operation at GXO Logistics’ Flowery Branch, Georgia warehouse. It is the first humanoid deployment running under a real Robots-as-a-Service contract, where GXO pays per-robot-per-hour for actual fulfillment work. The robots are picking totes off autonomous mobile robots, loading conveyors, and stacking containers, which sounds boring and is exactly why it matters.
- Boston Dynamics’ Atlas has shipped to Hyundai’s Robotics Metaplant Application Center and to Google DeepMind, and the entire 2026 production allocation is already committed. Additional customers will not get units until early 2027. Hyundai’s longer term plan is a Georgia factory producing 30,000 Atlas units per year by 2028.
- Figure AI’s Figure 02 wrapped its 11-month run at BMW Spartanburg with more than 90,000 sheet-metal parts handled across roughly 1,250 operating hours. We covered the retirement and the lessons last week; the summit context is that nobody on stage is treating that program as an outlier anymore.
The vibe shift is real. The 2024 question was “can humanoids do anything useful.” The 2026 question is “who do you call when your humanoid breaks at 2am on the second shift.” That is a different industry, with different procurement budgets, different parts catalogs, and a very different set of winners and losers than the one we were all watching last year. It is also genuinely strange to stand in a convention hall and watch the science fiction quietly migrate into the line item budget.