Automate filled McCormick Place in Chicago this past week with hard launches. I couldn’t make it this time, as I’m in Asia visiting companies (more on that soon). The themes that emerged from the week:
Industrial deployment is getting real. Cobot launched Proxie Gen2, a mobile-manipulation platform, citing 12,627 (very specific!) production hours already logged across hospitals and manufacturers. Moving and manipulating at once, in uncontrolled space and around people, is the genuine hard problem in commercial robotics. Logged operating hours are the signal of both performance and willingness to pay.
Safety certification clears the path to scale. For humanoids to reach insured, unionized industrial floors, safety has to be built in and validated end-to-end. With Halos for Robotics, NVIDIA moved to own the certification rail the industry has to ride, on top of the compute it already owns.
Two more worth flagging. Genesis AI’s Eno is a contrarian read on the form factor: it keeps the human-like hands but replaces the head-torso-legs body with a folding design. It looks sleek and space-efficient. And Hyundai’s $325M purchase of SoftBank’s remaining Boston Dynamics stake hands the sector a rare valuation comp, roughly $3.4bn, in a market that stays mostly private. This provides a benchmark to the slate of Chinese players filing to go public later this year.
And I published the first deep dive last week on the humanoids market, looking through the filings of Unitree and UBTech. Thank you to all of you who reached out and provided feedback! In case you missed it, check out here.
Below is a select highlight of Automate launches.
Down the Stack
Pilot to production. Cobot launched Proxie Gen2: two arms, 1,500-lb cart hauls, 200-lb lifts, and Self-dispatch. Proxie builds a real-time model of the facility and finds its own work, with no WMS integration or human dispatcher. Cobot claimed it’s already logged 12,627 production hours across hospitals and manufacturers. AEON, Hexagon’s humanoid, began performing production tasks at BMW’s Leipzig plant, and Agility is deploying Digit into Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The framing has shifted from “can robots work in manufacturing” to “how fast do they get productive.”
Owning the cert rail. NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics is a full-stack functional-safety system: IGX Thor and Holoscan Sensor Bridge at the compute and sensor layer, Halos OS for safety functions, and the Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, the first ANAB-accredited program for functional and AI safety in physical AI. The Lab is worth paying attention to. TÜV Rheinland, TÜV SÜD, UL Solutions, exida, SGS, and CertX all recognize it inside their certification paths, which inserts NVIDIA into the IEC 61508 / ISO 13849 / ISO 5469 pipeline every industrial robot has to clear. NVIDIA already owns the compute; it is now positioning to own the attestation layer above it.
Non-humanoid robot. Genesis AI debuted Eno, founder Zhou Xian’s first robot, backed by Eric Schmidt. It is deliberately non-humanoid: human-like in-house hands on a folding, articulated-panel body that collapses to a minimal footprint, with full-stack in-house AI and an optional screen that shows its reasoning. The bet is that the hands and the manipulation policy carry the value, not the silhouette. Personally I find that more palatable as a home robot, as it’s more functional like a machine than another family member or pet.
A rare comp. Hyundai is buying SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% of Boston Dynamics for $325M, taking the company to 100% ownership via a put exercised by SoftBank. The transaction implies a valuation near $3.4bn. That is a scarce hard comp in a sector that is otherwise private. An automaker consolidating control while a financial holder exits is a conviction signal about who intends to build versus trade.
Watch the BOM. Lots more signals happened in the components layer. Festo brought its SMS electric actuators to pneumatic price parity and launched GripperAI, a SKU-agnostic gripping stack spanning vacuum and mechanical. Yifan Motor showed humanoid-targeted joint motors and coreless DC motors in the 48V / 700W class. Kawasaki debuted the RL030N, billed as the first 8-axis arm built for physical AI (most industrial arms have 6), where the added axis allows for adaptive motion planning, rather than just repeating motions. XELA Robotics unveiled a tactile fingertip with a six-axis force-sensing nail and 30 tri-axial sensing points in the pulp. Electric actuation reaching pneumatic cost, plus a wave of humanoid joint motors, is what actually moves the cost curve in our BOM model. This is the part most of the week’s coverage stepped over.