Years ago, I trained for and completed an Ironman 70.3, which is 70.3 miles of swimming, biking and running. I don’t do triathlons anymore these days, but IROS brought the endurance athlete back out of me.
From pre-conference coffee on the CMU campus to lightning talks, lunchtime plenaries, walking meetings around the exhibition floor and hosting a final panel at 9 p.m., the days were full. Over two days, I had more than 50 conversations across 45 companies and labs. Below are some observations:
1. Humanoids are losing their legs
When I visited Sharpa’s Mountain View office in July, the team proudly showed me its North humanoid at the poker table. At IROS, it was mounted on a stationary base. No wheels, either.
The representative on the floor told me the change was intended to allow the robot to ship into the US following the FCC’s July restrictions on foreign-produced advanced robotic devices. The definition covers qualifying mobile robots, including humanoids and quadrupeds, and excludes fixed, stationary industrial robots.
‘So customers can add back their wheels if they want’, an exhibitor next to me commented. I thought it was a funny, very tangible example of how a regulatory change can show up in product design.
2. Selling hands, collecting data
Hands and grippers were everywhere, with quoted prices ranging from about $700 for a gripper to $50,000 for a highly dexterous hand. Many had new models that looked leaner and more human. From the demos alone, it wasn’t easy to tell how they differentiated themselves.
Wuji told me it ships 800-900 hands a month globally, with US prices of roughly $13,000–$19,000 including tax and customs. Sharpa quoted $50,000 for its Wave 01 hand (the W02 price is not yet disclosed) and named Google and Nvidia among its research customers.
I expect the market to become more clearly segmented by buyer: humanoid makers buying production grade, economical hands in volume, research labs paying for advanced capabilities, and factories buying grippers that last.
Several hand companies were also showing tools for collecting data. Sharpa has switched out Manus gloves for its own exoskeleton, quoted at $10,000 a pair. Wuji, Chestnut and PaXini also showed UMI gloves designed for data collection.
That makes sense to me. A lab might buy a handful of robot hands, then need a much larger stream of demonstrations to train them. Selling the collection hardware is one opportunity. Providing the data itself could create recurring revenue, if the hand makers can show that it improves training. PaXini, for example, operates its own data collection facilities.
3. Actuator know-how lives on the factory floor
There were plenty of actuator companies on the floor, too. MyActuator told me it serves US customers from Fremont and has two factories in China producing 500K units annually. It focuses on custom engineering and aims to bring down turnaround to weeks.
And from my conversation at maxon, I learned that many of its patents are in process engineering. The know-how inside a plant also lives with the people operating the machines. It’s hard to transfer, even when the same company opens a new factory in a different country.
I increasingly believe that building a US actuator supply chain requires much more than opening factories. The challenge is scaling production while consistently making precise, reliable products that last. Some of the hardest knowledge to acquire comes from years of working with the machines and refining the process.
4. Sensors: can you source them, and will they last?
A professor doing medical robotics research commented that none of the tactile sensors in the market today lasts, and the biggest bottleneck is in materials science, not models. A few hours later, a PaXini sales representative told me its Hall-effect sensors last for 10 million cycles and described testing the sensors after boiling them in a hotpot and dropping them in ice water. An engineer at Daimon said BMW and Siemens use its sensors in deployments. Sharpa demo’d its e-skin, made in-house, that detected pressure on parts of the robot’s body, including its shoulders and elbows.
My guess is that the professor and these suppliers are right, but in different scenarios. How do we measure the durability: under what loads, doing which tasks, and with how much maintenance?
An entrepreneur who helps robotics companies deploy their systems told me that one of his biggest frustrations is finding competitive domestic lidar sensors. He described a US lidar option priced at $60,000 versus a $500 imported option that performed better for his application. I’d like to dig into the exact models and specifications, but that price gap was shocking to me.
5. Getting a robot to work is a big business
Commercial installations still require integration, programming and ongoing support. The Standard Bots team described deployment engineers traveling to customer sites in various states, often starting with a single arm. Applications included programmed welding and CNC machine tending, with newer AI applications also in development.
Forward-deployed robotics engineer (FDRE?) feels like an increasingly common job description.
Independent evaluation is another need I’ve encountered while writing about robot foundation models. How do you compare capabilities objectively beyond the demo or press release? Robocurve works with universities on benchmarks for different use cases and plans to offer independent evaluations to companies and governments.
I like the picks and shovels plays that enable deployment. Integration, calibration and evaluation are all common pain points across robotics companies. If someone can standardize, automate and programmatically solve these, there can be a durable business.
A couple of other conversations stayed with me. The Robotis team told me its actuators are used in Disney’s Spider-Man and Olaf robots. Entertainment may be one of the fastest-traction deployment categories; robot fights are another example beyond theme park robots. Professor Yu Sun at the University of Toronto gave an inspiring talk on robotics at micro-nanometer scales, on IVF and fighting brain cancer (Learn more here: https://sun.mie.utoronto.ca/).
I’m writing this piece on the 7AM flight out of Pittsburgh, sleepy and smiling. IROS brought the endurance athlete back out of me, and gave me plenty of reasons to keep showing up.