Show Notes
Join host Steve Crowe and The Robot Report editorial team (Gene Demaitre, Mike Oitzman, and Brianna Wessling) for the annual end-of-year wrap-up. The team breaks down the most significant stories, trends, and market shifts that defined the robotics industry in 2025 and looks ahead to 2026.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Business Shake-ups: An analysis of iRobot entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy and ABB selling its mobile robot division to SoftBank.
- The Year of the Humanoid: A look at the $3.5B+ invested in humanoid companies and the rise of physical AI.
- Autonomous Systems: Updates on Waymo’s scaling challenges, Amazon’s 1M deployed robots, and the impact of autonomous systems in the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts.
- Industry Trends: The spin-out of Intel RealSense, the return of a national robotics strategy, and new approaches to home robotics (1X, Sunday, Weave).
Featured Guest Vignettes:
- John Santagate: On tote-to-man methodologies and multi-agent orchestration.
- Chris Matthieu (RealSense): On open-source brains for physical AI and the emergence of robot sports.
- Evan Helda (Nebius): On data pipelines, real-world data collection, and world models for training.
More from The Robot Report Podcast
Ben Waters, CEO of Wibotic, joins Mike Oitzman and Gene Demaitre to discuss how wireless charging is evolving for larger, more autonomous robotics fleets.
Janine Sinanan-Singh, Director of Gen AI Research at Appen, joins Mike Oitzman and Gene Demaitre to discuss the data, evaluation, and human oversight needed to advance robotics and agentic AI. They explore how video and egocentric data can support robot training, why latency and generalization remain difficult, and where human judgment still matters. Janine describes Appen’s evolution from speech and linguistics into supporting generative AI, multimodal systems, agents, and robotics with expert data. The conversation examines what humanoid robot demos do—and don’t—show, how synthetic data can help teams scale, and what it takes to evaluate systems beyond the lab.
The interview this week explores the European robotics market with OMRON’s Miguel Garces Moreno, covering growth in collaborative robots and AMRs, shifting demand toward sectors such as pharma, and the impact of labor shortages and supply-chain pressures.
Sai Vemprala, CTO of General Robotics, talks about why robotics still faces a major gap between research and real-world deployment—and how the company’s Grid platform aims to close it.
Teddy Haggerty is the founder and CEO of Robostore and Robo Inc., where he has helped push robotics into education, enterprise pilots, and early commercial deployments. His perspective is shaped by years of building in drones, crypto infrastructure, manufacturing, and import-export before turning his focus to robots.