CES 2026 robotics recap; 2026 predictions

(upbeat music) - What's up everybody, welcome in episode 226 of the Robot Report podcast, I'm Steve Crow, executive editor of the Robot Report. Happy New Year, everybody, our first episode of 2026. Hope everybody's having a great start to the New Year, including senior editor of the Robot Report, Michael. It's been Mike Happy New Year, how you doing man? - Hey Happy New Year Steve, yeah, welcome back from the holidays, boy, last week was just a crazy one. Seems like 2026 is coming like a rucking ball this year with you were at CS, we're gonna talk about that and just a crazy amount of news for the first week of the year, everybody unleashed the damn of press releases last week. So we were quite busy, lots of news. - Yeah, so much for slowing into the new year, right? It was crazy, so thank you to you and Jean and Brianna for holding down the fort. Yeah, CS was fun, man, I haven't been there and we'll get into recapping it here in a minute, but I have not been at that show, probably since I joined WTWH, so I joined in 2018, I don't know if I've been since then. - Yeah, I've gone the last three years I think. And it's amazing in a previous life, so at the previous media company that I worked for in Eugene knows about this, you might as well a little bit, but I actually used to produce a half day robotics conference at CES and to see the scale at which it's changed and how much more robotics is at the show, not only in the conference, but just in all the show floor areas is absolutely amazing to see, and we used to sell booths at this media company for CES robotics companies. It was, and frankly, I was not selling the booths, but frankly, we didn't do a very good job at it. We just always sold these low cost social robots for the home. We just sold those companies every single year and none of those actually came to fruition to be actual products, but it was always constrained to sort of one area. And then in our last couple of years doing this, you saw other companies start to spread out and it's like they wouldn't come back to our area. They wanted to go into the education section or they wanted to go to the home health section of the floor. And they started to scatter a little bit, but this year, and I'm sure you had the same experience, they're just all over the place. All different halls at the venue, different hotels and stuff like that. So it was exciting to go back and see the scale at which it's grown, but I'm not sure, again, CES has always been, you and I were just talking about this in the green room, it's always been a future-looking show, a prototype show, what does the future of technology maybe look like, and I think that was kind of the same takeaway that I had, I talked to a lot of close robotics contacts who were there. So, you know, not sure there was much to write home about from a usability standpoint, but again, fun to see all this stuff kind of come together. We'll also talk about the news, like you said, there was a ton of news that happened last weekend. We're also going to do something special. We've done this for the last couple of years. We have a couple of good friends of the show. Chris Matthew, he's the VP of Developer Ecosystem at Resense. And then we also have Adi Heinler, he's the co-founder and CEO of Starship. I believe also one of the co-founders of Skype from way back. - That's right, yep. - So Adi, I've talked to him a number of times over the years. So they were kind enough to lend us a few minutes and share some of their thoughts, some of their predictions for what you're going to see from the robotics industry in 2026. So we're going to weave those in as special little segments throughout the show. So make sure you're paying close attention for that. Before we get to the CES recap, again, just plugging the robotics summit in Expo, which is coming up very, very quickly. May 27th and 28th up in Boston, in my neck of the woods. A lot of exciting stuff here. We should be announcing probably the first 30 speakers here in the next couple of days. We're opening registration as well in the next couple of days. But we're going to have 6,000 attendees for the robotics development ecosystem. We'll have over 250 exhibitors. We do have a couple of keynotes that are announced with Michael Taylor. She's the head of robotics strategy at GM. GM has obviously been doing a lot in robotics for a number of years. And I think Michael's there to help sort of change over and do even more with robotics. We also have Rust to Drake from Toyota Research Institute who will be talking about their work and developing large behavior models to help all sorts of different robots learn tasks more quickly and ultimately become more useful at their-- whatever tasks it is that they're trying to do. We also have a very exciting closing keynote that we're in the final stages of confirming and we'll be announcing that soon. But if you want to get involved, if you want to see what we have going on, you can head over to roboticssummit.com to learn more. Again, we'll be announcing a lot more in the coming days and weeks, so stay tuned. And if you have any questions, obviously reach out to anyone of us here at the robot report and we're happy to answer any questions that you guys might have about the show. But I'll come and quit. All right, again, Chris Matthew VP of Developer Ecosystem at RealSans. Chris, welcome to the show. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be on your show. Yeah, hey, so we're here to talk about what the future holds for the robotics industry. And you sit at a unique seat. You get a chance to now innovate at a furious pace. So I'm really curious, what are some of the things that you think are going to be important for robotics developers to think about in the coming years? Well, you know, we do sit at a very unique position in the robotic space because at RealSans, we make the eyes. We make the vision cortex of the robots. And without eyes, they wouldn't be able to maneuver around your space or interact or see. And what I've been seeing, no fun intending, is that spatial awareness, as the physical AI, as we give AI a body, the AI is now able to maneuver in your space. Spatial awareness is like paramount now. Like the robot needs to know what it's looking at. So it doesn't hurt a person or doesn't bump into walls or be able to grab cups or funny shaped items. And I think in addition to that, this whole physical AI movement, so spatial awareness huge. I think we're just going to see a natural progression where depth is just part of the RGB, the red-green blue vision of every robot. But the physical AI, where the AI doesn't get hard-coded or programmed anymore, you're giving them missions, and they're getting smarter and smarter around trying to see something and figure out how to solve your mission without a programmer telling its depth by step what to do. So you're seeing vision language models, vision language, action models. I think we're just going to see a ton more physical AI and spatial awareness as two of my seven grand predictions. And what do you think the consequences of being able to see better mean for the future accuracy of what robots can think and do? So I know in video, we're working with them on something they call holoscam. And what we're doing with in video is we've got holoscam running on our cameras now. So what that means is you can stream all of your sensor data, all your red-green blue depth sensors of a real-sense camera directly into the GPUs of a Jetson. So what's coming is that you see today, like when you watch a humanoid or an arm sometimes, they kind of look a little janky for lack of a better word, where they kind of move an inch and think, and then move again, well, now we'll get to the point with holoscam and GPUs. These things will be able to think and react even faster, so you'll start seeing natural movement of robotics in the space, but also mission-critical, where these robots are working with people, being able to stop on a dime or maneuver out of a person's way so that humans are safe from not getting injured by these heavy machines, you know? These robots are about as heavy as people, these humanoids. So yeah, I mean, you know, CES, I think the big story, Mike, it was really the main driver for me going to this show and was for at least a few other folks who I talked to as well, was Boston Dynamics, I knew for a little while that they were hoping to be demoing Atlas for the first time, and then I think they finally confirmed it a week or two out from the show, they were co-located in the Hyundai booth, Hyundai, of course, is their parent company. And that was really the reason that I wanted to go out. You know, I think it was, what did you think? I mean, Boston Dynamics is kind of the creator of humanoid, the whole category, they've been doing this for more than two decades and have always been at the forefront of the category, but they've never publicly shown or publicly demoed the Atlas, any version of their humanoid robots. It's not just the Atlas robot, go back to Petman and other versions of the humanoid robots they've had over the years, they've never publicly shown it. So you and I got a private demo a couple of years ago after the robotics summit, I'm sure many other people listening to this have seen private demos of Atlas and other Boston Dynamics humanoids at their headquarters in and around Boston, but they've never publicly shown any of the humanoids at an event before. So to me, it was like a monumental moment in robotics. You have this industry leading humanoid company that's been so tight knit, their development has been so tight to the vest they've never shown it before. Combine that with all the interest and hype and talk around humanoid robots right now. I think that was a real driving force for me going and many others, what did you think of it just from afar before I get to my place? - And again, we have asked them, we've provided an opportunity at the robotics summit in the past couple of years asking, can we see even when the hydraulic version, right? We said, could we do that and they said, "Oh, that's not possible." And then when the electric version was announced, we thought that was an opportunity. So yeah, I would have loved to have seen it live but watching it remotely. I mean, it was very safe demo, I think, in terms of what they showed, right? But I think the experience I haven't talked with the team there, the product team, they're about what they had to do to prepare for this because they didn't want the robot to fall in its face. I'm sure that would have been a disaster, right? Although I think, remember when they were on America's got telling, we said they probably could have won if they would have put the robot on stage with the other quadrupeds, right? That might have been a nice coup for them as well. So they've had several opportunities and to wait till this moment, it's very pragmatic decision. I think on their part, as you said, and they are a pragmatic company, right? They don't do anything that's over the top, necessarily very well rehearsed. I'm sure and controlled. But again, it's a step forward for them. And I think the industry as a whole, as you said, being one of the perceived leaders in this industry now, the proof is gonna be in what happens next for them. They've got some attention now, right? Where did they go from here? - Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you. So this was a very safe demo for them. I know they were nervous about a lot of this, rightfully. So it started the day before CES opened. They had a press conference. So I got invited to the press conference. And this was, again, the very first time, I forget the woman's name that was on stage. She was on stage with Zach Jekowski. He's the VP and GM of Atlas. We've talked to him a number of times over the years. He used to work when was the lead engineer on the spot robot, excuse me. But it was just amazing to see all the phones come out. Everybody's waiting for Atlas. We didn't exactly know what it was gonna do on stage or where it was going to be. But you're point about them being pragmatic. I also appreciate what I believe is honesty from them. You know, it was interesting. There was a couple reporters who attended this press conference in a Q&A session with the executives of Boston Dynamics and Hyundai after that press conference demo that were, they're more, these reporters specifically cover Hyundai from an automotive standpoint. This keynote was really all about their robotics angle and how it's gonna help their manufacturing going forward. So a couple of reporters asked me, like, are they the real deal? It seems like a lot of other human-oated companies are blowing smoke up our butts. What is your opinion on Boston Dynamics? And again, we're not inside Boston Dynamics. We've never been inside Boston Dynamics, but you build this relationship with a company like that over the years and I think they are pragmatic and I think that's why they should be applauded. Very, the second that Atlas starts stands up on the stage at the press conference and starts to walk, you know, Zach comes right out and says, hey, listen, this is being tele-operated by an engineer right over here. You could see him on the side of the stage controlling Atlas with the remote control and instructing Atlas when it was rotating its arms and its head and its waist. That was all being tele-opped by a human. But they're telling you that up front and I think Zach's exact words are, we wanna keep this simple today, right? And I think that's fair. And when you contrast that with all of the hype of all these other humanoid robots that were at the show or these other humanoid robots that we see on videos and the internet, you don't know what's what. And I think them just being up front about this and saying, hey, this is very complicated. We don't want anything to go wrong today. One, from a safety standpoint, but two, from a reputation standpoint, they have a lot on the line, right? I spent a ton of money to buy them and you don't wanna have these clips of the robot, you know, failing at doing something simple like walking on a stage, which is not simple. I shouldn't use that phrase, right? Something just, you know, just walking around, you don't want these clips going viral all over the internet. You know, why did Hyundai spend a billion dollars on this company if it can't? After all this time, get a humanoid robot to just walk around the stage. So, yeah, I think it was pretty well rehearsed. I think they put a lot of effort into making sure that it was gonna go right. And I think it went pretty well. So that was the press conference demo. And then you flip to the next day at the booth, I put out a video, it's gone pretty, it's gone a lot of views on my LinkedIn channel. Just to, you know, bring you behind the scenes a little bit, that was actually the very, you know, the minute the show floor opened. Now a bunch of us just rushed to the Hyundai booth and we were the first cohort of people that were actually led into the booth. And that video that I put out there was the first demo that they did on the first day of CES. So that was the first time that they ran it in front of a group of people at the show, which was pretty cool. And so again, they're explaining the demo to us before it actually starts and there was a teleoperator there with a VR headset on just in case Atlas needed help in the part sequencing demo that it did. And there was a monitor in between the human teleoperator and Atlas, which was located a little bit off to the left hand side of the teleoperator. And there was a monitor there that it would flash, you know, between idle, which meant the robot wasn't doing anything. Then it would change to autonomous, which meant the robot is autonomously opening up this rack that contains the car parts and it's autonomously picking the parts out and putting them onto a cart or it would say teleop. So which meant, you know, Atlas needs a little bit of help. And the video I posted, I think it was about, I don't know, eight or nine minutes long. And Atlas needed help a couple of times, right? There was a couple of times that in these parts that it were picking, I think it were part of a bumper. If I'm not mistaken and there were just these really long thin parts. And it was kind of complicated for it to pick it up and move it out of this cart that it was in and had to lift a couple of lids off the top of the cart. So I think there was a couple of times where it mispicked the piece. There may have been a time where the piece got stuck on one of the edges of the rack and that the human teleoperator came in and helped it out and, you know, Atlas continued on its way. But I think, again, I think they're being realistic about this, right? They have never once said that these things are going to be completely autonomous or that they're ready right now to be deployed in Hyundai facilities around the world or at other customer facilities around the world. You know, the timeline for this is they want to be able to manufacture. So this means that doesn't mean they're going to actually be making 30,000 of these, but they want to have a process in place by 2028 where they could manufacture up to 30,000 Atlas units. So they're also saying by 2028, it will be doing part sequencing tasks inside of Hyundai facilities. And then by 2030, they hope to be having Atlas do more complicated tasks in Hyundai facilities and other facilities around the world. So, you know, that's two and four years from now. That's quite along, in my mind, with how quickly things have accelerated. That's a long time from now, especially the 2030 deadline. It's quite a ways away. And I think it validates the assumption we had that they would be deployed first in Hyundai factories. Yeah, but I also, they're just not ready yet. And I think that's okay. These are very complicated machines and they're just not ready yet. So I think when you, when the folks listening to this, again, are very educated on robotics and how difficult these things are to make them reliable. When you see all these other things about, "Hey, we're gonna deploy humanoids in your home this year, next week, next month or some point in 2020." It's just not true, right? It's just, or if that actually does happen, they're gonna be completely useless, right? So I applaud them for doing this, you know, another conversation that was had with others at CES is just all this hype, right? Whether it's Tesla and other humanoid makers deploying robots into the home or how autonomous some of these robotaxes are in other parts of the world and it's not true. And there's just trickery that happens. And even with Waymo, like how much teleop is involved versus how much teleop is not involved. Nobody really knows. And I do think that's a problem, but for a company like Boston Dynamics, who again, I believe that they are more down to earth, they're taking hits when they're saying, "Hey, it's gonna take us two to four years longer to deploy these things." It's for some reason hits them in the reputation on the reputation front where like they're not as good as these other humanoid companies, where I just think it's backwards, fortunate, you know. So, but again, I think there is a long way to go and you saw, you see this with Boston Dynamics. Again, I even think with that demo that they did in the booth, it wasn't all that fast. I think they probably toned it down a little bit because they just wanted it to go well and they've never done it before. So I've seen, even when it was walking on the stage during the press conference, it moved a lot faster than it moved in the booth demo. So again, I think they were being very, very cautious about what they were doing. I don't know if you've seen this. I think I shared it on Slack. Yesterday I came across this, where one of the Boston Dynamics Engineer who works on Atlas shared it on his Twitter feed of Atlas doing a backflip at the end of CES, and there's a whole crowd there, and they're counting down three, two, one, and then Atlas does a backflip and it stumbles, right? It loses, I think they said it was a cover for one of the end effectors, one of the hands flew off 'cause as it was trying to land during the backflip, it lost its balance. - Yep, so I was able to. - Was able to stabilize itself thanks to different types of reinforcement learning technologies, but as it was catching itself, one of the gripper covers flew off. Again, people just crushed them for that, and oh, you see these unitary humanoids are doing backflips in its way easier, and I've seen things on social media about how far ahead unitary is compared to Boston Dynamics, and it's just, I think a great microcosm of what happened at CES on the humanoid front. That's all anybody is talking about. That's all social media timelines are just filled with the humanoids are here, and the humanoids are ready, and you know, Boston Dynamics, and that was the only humanoid at the show that was actually doing something somewhat useful, right? All these other ones are just walking around, they're dancing, they're doing Kung Fu and martial arts and boxing, which if you take each of those products by themselves, it's an incredible feat of engineering to get the engine AI, for example. They went viral maybe a week before CES, very militaristic video where their humanoids were walking around with security guards and fighting people and kicking people, and that robot was at the show, and it was doing similar things, you know, showing off its martial arts capabilities. But then there's videos of it falling over multiple times and just how dangerous. So again, when you look at, you know, Boston Dynamics has a long way to go to deploy these at scale in commercial facilities and they will tell you that. I think the challenge with all the other humanoids that you saw at the show was like, what do they do? And they're just R&D platforms for robotics engineers to mess around with, to test different types of control algorithms and AI techniques and all that stuff. There is no business model for them, right? So I think the average person who was at CES probably doesn't understand that, they don't see that. They just say, oh, look at this unitary humanoid, it's way more athletic than Boston Dynamics is, they must have a, they must be way further ahead in the development cycle is, no, it's apples and oranges, they're not going after the same market, same type of customer. So, you know, Boston Dynamics, they have to have way more things buttoned up and the reliability needs to be way higher. The manufacturer ability, right? I don't know if you saw how closely I think I included a side-by-side photo of the prototype Atlas, which is the one that they demoed in the booth and during the press conference, in the new production version of Atlas, which they introduced at the show. - Yeah, so we have to see the new version three, right? That's what they're calling this, it's completely sort of a new industrial design to the limbs and other places, but again, designed for manufacturability now, not so much just the engineering. - 100%, it's complete, it's way different, right? So again, go to the robotreport.com, read the story that I wrote about it. You scroll halfway down, you'll see this picture and it's completely different. And I cannot believe some of the other people, Mike, who are working in humanoid robotics, I won't share their names, but you can find them online. Other people who are trying to do similar things, who are trying to engineer these humanoid robots to scale and work reliably at scale out in the real world, doing real work at commercial companies are just crushing the design, saying they don't like the fact that the legs, they're not just straight now, right? And you got sort of these offset shins or lower legs are offset now, and the arms are different. And they're telling you, like, hey, we've learned a lot from commercializing spot. There's a couple thousand spot quadrupeds out in the real world. They have learned a lot from this, right? How they initially built spot, if it needed repairs out in the field, it was probably a pain in the ass to fix that thing for a long time. Maybe it still is a pain in the ass. I don't know, but stretch the same thing. They're starting to deploy their stretch trailer unloading system at scale with really high class commercial companies that demand high levels of reliability. And when something does go wrong, you need to be able to fix this thing quickly. And if you can't, I'm not going to ultimately buy your product at the end of the day. So they've done all this work to try to make Atlas something that can be fixed quickly in the field if something goes wrong. Austin Dynamics is claiming something goes wrong with the legs or the arms or something else, the way they've built this new production version, they can fix those issues in five minutes or less. Whether that's true or not, we'll find that out going forward. But that manufacturability has changed the look of the legs and the arms a little bit, right? And these humanoid people are just like crushing the designs and they don't like it. And I think that's again, another microcosm in good example of what's wrong in robotics. And something that has been wrong in robotics for quite some time, there's too much that goes into what it looks like versus the functionality of it. Right. And I just can't believe that I saw some of those comments and heard some of those comments. It's like, they've done so much work. They've done so much testing. They have Hyundai for crying out loud. That is an expert at manufacturing complicated machines that is helping them out. And together, they've arrived at this design for the V3 for the production version. So I couldn't believe how upset some people were that I've talked to and I've seen some commentary online about the new design. I just couldn't believe it because this is what we all want. We all want these machines to reliably work and be part of the workforce and keep things going out in the real world. And here's how they think they're going to get there. So it was interesting. Did you see any of those comments? I haven't even drawn deep on all the comments, but I can imagine where they're coming from. And the end of the day, this meantime between failures is probably the most important number for humanoids, right? And especially the hands, the fact is, you can have an elegant and beautiful design. But if it doesn't last and you can't repair it, as you said in minutes, there's a difference between designing a beautiful machine as opposed to a machine that can function in production environments, certainly, but even in the home, right? So once we get to that point, no consumer is going to want to invest the amount of money that it's going to cost comparatively for these types of machines. When and if they get to the home, they're going to expect them to work, right? If it breaks, they're going to be upset. They're going to have a lot of return products. So how do you build a robust system? Yeah. So we'll see. Again, I think there's a lot of work for Atlas to be done. I think they'll tell you that. They have a new partnership with Google DeepMind, which they announced at CES as well. I tried to capture it a little bit. In my piece, don't know if I did a good job of it, but it's like a full circle moment, almost. Google owned Boston Dynamics years ago. It was around that time. I forget what year it was. But when Google was bonding up, robotics companies left and right, I think they bought seven or eight of them. And Boston Dynamics was one of them at the time. And then they turned around and sold Boston Dynamics to Softbank a few years after that. So that was about eight or nine years ago. So to see them coming back, working together, again, it's kind of funny, right? Yeah, I think we were shocked in the newsroom that this was-- relationship was coming about. But when you think about the pedigree here, you can go back to the fact that there's probably still a lot quite a few folks that had an affinity for the Boston Dynamics acquisition inside of Google, right? I knew this was happening. So again, I talked to somebody at Boston Dynamics weeks and weeks and weeks ago, I'm writing a story on humanoids and what's going to happen in 2026. And somebody said that they were going to be announcing a new AI partner, but they couldn't tell me who it was. And I just remember, I said to this person while Aaron Saunders, he was formerly Chief Technology Officer at Boston Dynamics. He was there for 20 years in November. He left. And then he joined-- or sorry, he left in the fall. And then in November, announced that he was joining Google DeepMind, because robotics hardware engineering. And I just made sense, right? So it's two leaders in their respective fields coming together. But I think that's the question that I have. I talked to Caroline Perotta. I think she's the head of robotics at Google DeepMind. She was there, all of this. She gave a great presentation a couple weeks back at the humanoid summit. I was really impressed with the program that they've developed at DeepMind for robotics, right? Yep. And she's great. I think that's the question for me in order for these humanoids, the promise of humanoids is that they're going to be able to do multiple things at once, right? So you can deploy Atlas here, and then it can go switch and go do this task, and then it can go do that task without having to be hand programmed by an engineer to do all of those things. So that's not an easy task. That's not an easy thing to do, right? So all these AI techniques and technologies where they're at today to where the promise of these humanoids have to go, that's the biggest key to me. Can they close that gap? Can they deliver on what they're promising? Obviously everybody working in the field seems to think that they can deliver on this stuff. I'm a little bit skeptical of that. I think other folks in robotics are skeptical of that as well. Because all these AI techniques, they're not 100% reliable. Not that anything's 100% reliable, but things happen with these AI products that we're not really sure why they're happening. There's hallucinations, and you know, think about silly GPT queries, and you put these things in, and it's spitting out wrong answers, and there's different types of malfunctions and unpredictability, and we're not exactly 100% sure why these things happen. So when these robots are being deployed again at Hyundai facilities or other commercial companies, they need to be reliable and work most of the time. They can't be having these malfunctions because, you know, hey, whatever AI technology, it's using, you know, how to hiccup, like that's unacceptable. So I think that's to me, and it's a big question. Are they going to be able to is all this AI stuff? Is it going to deliver on what they're promising? Nobody knows. So I think that's the big question, you know, but we'll have to see. But, yeah, humanoids was certainly the takeaway from the show. Again, there is probably two or three dozen humanoids, Mike, easily. I shared some videos with you guys. There's one P and D robotics Chinese company. They had their humanoid robot just walking out in the hallways amongst people. And I have a video that I shared with you guys. And I think my comment was, I remember the days of decade ago where we were concerned about two-wheeled mobile robots wandering the aisles at trade shows in the trade show, folks, you know, are like freaking out. Like you can't leave your booth with the robot. The mobile robot case it bumps into somebody. Now we're talking about humanoid robots walking free in the aisles, right? Yeah. I don't know. I should have done a better job, like asking safety questions, because again, this one was outside of the P and D robotics booth. Yeah, but there was crowds of people there. And it was just walking right up to people. And there was, it's just fascinating to see one. It was, again, it was being tele-oveted by an engineer. Just feed away with like an Xbox controller. And it would, you know, this person would control the robot. It's walking around, and then it would stop. But there's so much power just being, you know, going through these motors and going through the whole robot that it would like move, it would sway back and forth while it was just standing still, right? Because they're working so hard to make it stand still. And when I saw that happen, my god, I probably shouldn't be standing here, you know, like what? If you've seen some videos online, these were the humanoid limbs, they just start going crazy and flailing around or they fall down. Again, engineer, I fell down multiple times. I heard Nura's, I did not see the Nura one fall, but I heard from multiple folks that the Nura one fell down. And these are heavy, heavy metal products that if they could, if they did fall into you, it could, it could really hurt. So, but then I go to other humanoid companies, like Lymex Dynamics, which had their new Alley humanoid there along with Tron. They had Tron inside of a blow up dinosaur inflatable because they wanted it to look like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That'd be fun, right? But they were told that they couldn't take the robots outside of the booth. And they had this little 10 by 10 booth that was tucked away in one of the halls where P&D Robotics had a massive booth. So, I don't know if certain folks were just breaking the rules and just kind of operating at their own pace and doing whatever the heck they wanted or not. But yeah, there was no sort of concern. Yeah, most robots Dynamics had their robot Atlas was behind, you know, a stanchion. Nobody was getting back there except for Boston Dynamics. Employees or Hyundai employees in AI's was falling. But it was again, they had it on a boxing ring. So, it was only engine AI employees who were in there. But there was definitely different perspectives on how can we be safe with these products. Unitry, there's are much smaller. They had their really miniature boxing robots there. And there was a number of people who went into their boxing ring and were actually boxing the humanoids like Jake Hall. No, I don't know Jake's video, right? He was boxing with one. So, I don't know if you're really going to get hurt by something of that size, but there are some other large humanoids that were falling. But again, I think, I think the end again, it's amazing to see these products in person, right? It is amazing. I don't want to short sell the work that has been done to build each of these products on their own because they are amazing feats of engineering. But again, I think the common person who was at CES probably doesn't understand the gap between, you know, what these robots are able to do now and what a lot of the companies are saying that they can do or will be able to do in the next couple of years, right? A lot of the Chinese humanoids were there. They weren't doing anything. They were hanging from a tether. They were just standing still in a booth, not really moving. There was a number of companies where the engineers would, they had a little handle on the back of each humanoid robot and somebody would control and command the humanoid to walk forward but an engineer would be holding on to that handle, like holding on for dear lives, because they're unsure of what's going to happen. So, again, just seeing those different levels of those different perspectives and approaches to how to handle that at a live event with 150,000 people. It's just interesting, right? But I think that's the question that's, again, so you see all the stuff about humanoids are here from the general media and from general public that attended CES. They're all jazzed about what's happening, which I think is fair. You know, the proliferation of these things the last number of years and how many more units there are is quite impressive. Well, you know, for folks who haven't, who have been to CES, the booth next door is a vacuum cleaning robot or a pool cleaning robot, right? And so the consumers have already had an experience with that and they just sort of transfer, oh, so it's right next to the vacuum cleaning robot. So, it's at the same level of development, right? Yeah, and again, I think that was sort of my general takeaway. And again, I talked to other, you know, several other very trusted folks in robotics and we all kind of had the same takeaway, right? I think one of the words we used in one of my chats was someone was silliness, right? There's a lot of silliness from a robotics standpoint at the show, but that's always been the case at CES. Not even just robotics products with other products, right? You know, I've been going to CES for probably 15 years on and off and used to be probably more of a car show, but I remember in the early days of be going, these car manufacturers would always have these prototype cars at the show, right? Concept car. Concept car. And, you know, this is the rider experience of the future. And none of those ever see the light of day, right? So that's a lot that is pervasive throughout the show still and very much so with robotics. I mean, there was, again, I did not, I don't claim to have seen everything. It's impossible to see everything there. You know, agility robotics was there. I don't think they had a demo. I think they just had digit there sort of on as a statue in their booth. And we know digits out there doing some real stuff in the real world and really breaking down some barriers from the humanoid standpoint. TeraDine was there with a palatizing demo. Polymath robotics had a really fun demo. I don't think I shared this with you. So Polymath is a, they're a software company, an autonomy company, they don't have an autonomy. Yep, they work with all sorts of different types of vehicles. Could be, you know, construction, could be mining, could be agriculture. But so I stopped by their booth. And so they had some live feeds of robots that they have out in the field. And then they had this little table with a mini toy tractor on it. And the toy tractor was sitting on a digital map. In Ilya Maranoff, he's one of the co-founders of the company. He said, "Hey, just pick up that toy tractor and just move it somewhere else on the table." So I picked it up and I moved it, you know, as far to the other side of the map on the table that I could. And he goes, "Now watch this live feed here." So I was actually controlling an autonomous tractor or in some sort of autonomous robot in Idaho at one of their customer sites. So wherever an attendee picked up that toy tractor and placed it on the map, you're actually physically commanding that robot out in the field to go to that spot, to whatever spot you will tractor on the table. The robot in Idaho drives to that digital, or to that physical spot in the real world. So, you know, there were, I don't want to sell it short, that there was not any sort of useful things there. Of course there was, there was a bunch of robot hands. You know, Sharpa had this dexterous robot hand that was just unbelievable. The level of dexterity that it had, this five fingered robot hand, Dyna Robotics. This was one of my, you know, top picks of the show. They were founded by Jason Ma in some others, a couple of years ago. They're one of the, you know, more on the AI side of things, but they had a laundry folding robot, and CES has a long sad history with laundry folding robots over the years. And this was by far the best one I've ever seen. And I posted it on my LinkedIn, and again, the number of people who are saying they feel the same way is interesting. So, you know, they're claiming it's not being tele-operated. It was folding towels and t-shirts, and it can fold other types of clothes as well. So, I filmed it and watched it for a number of minutes, and it was just amazing to see that. And they actually have a customer, which is, you know, I did not know that until I was at the show. So, we can share it, but it's on the Dyna Robotics website. They're working with a commercial laundromat called Monster Laundry. This company processes like almost 2,000 pounds of laundry every week, a lot of which comes from commercial gyms and yoga studios and medical offices, things like that. So, they fold a lot of towels and other types of clothing. And like most, or like many other types of companies, they have a labor shortage, and they can't keep up with capacity. They could have more customers and bring in more money if they had more employees, but they just don't have that. So, they're trying to figure out how can we tackle, you know, some of the lower-hanging fruit that we have coming through this facility every single day. So, according to the case study on the Dyna Robotics website, they said in this three-month span, the robot has folded over 200,000 towels from 10 different customers, which the laundromat is saying has saved them hundreds of hours of employee time. So, it's helping them unlock more business capacity, which is what robots are supposed to do, right? So, you know, there were some useful happily robotics had a great booth showing off some of their grippers and stuff like that, but yeah, as we set off the top, you know, CES has always been a futuristic show, you know, looking into the future, but again, from a robotics standpoint, a lot of the stuff is half baked. Maybe that's even giving most of the robots a little too much credit, but still fun to see, right? - Yeah, one of the interesting videos I saw in multiple channels was this new robot cleaner from RoboRock. It's standard floor cleaner robot, but now it's got legs that, and wheels try to get it up to stairs. - Yeah. - We talked about that in the past, is one of those sort of last remaining hurdles for vacuum cleaner to get between multi floor robots. - If anybody knows, if you're listening to this, if you're not, is it the Tron1 from Linux Dynamics? I think it's the Tron1, we gave them an RBR50 award last year. It's a, you know, really locomotion R&D platform for robotics engineers to use to, you can, it's modular, so you can have it have legs, you can have it have feet and legs, or you can have it with the wheels. And it kind of reminded me that RoboRock robot kind of reminded me of the Tron, but with a different top module, right? In the top module for RoboRock is the robot vacuum. There was another crazy one. I don't know if I, I didn't get a video of it, but I've watched a video of the prototype, just from the company website after CES from a company called MOVA, and it's, they had a demo of this in the booth, but I, you know, I stuck around for a while, and it wasn't, the demo was not happening, so I moved on. But they actually have a drone that has a little carrying, you know, here we go. A robot vacuum, it's like a kangaroo, right? The robot vacuum drives into the pouch on the bottom of the drone, it's a quadcopter drone, and then the drone turns on and can fly in my, in your house, and it can bring the robot vacuum onto the second floor of your house. Stuff like that that you see, right? It's like, there's no way that that is the best, the best approach, having a robot vacuum that can clean multiple levels of a house. Like just get multiple robot vacuums. That's probably the best. - Right, that was my, that was my meter response. The cost of that versus the, yeah, the drone's stirring up all the dust, or maybe the drone drives around. Yeah, it gets all the dust off the high shelves. Or the drone flies in, who's controlling the drone? Like am I controlling the drone? I have no idea, but you saw so much of that kind of stuff, right? It was like, oh, that's interesting, right? Or is that actually something that I would ever buy, spend money on, want in my house, or something that would work well, probably not, right? So there was a lot of that kind of stuff, a lot of fun, you know, ideas, you know, Waymo was there with all of their robot axes in a massive booth, so it was fun to talk to them and hear about some of their challenges and their concerns with some of the other players. - You didn't write any of the taxis around town. - You know, I did not. Waymo was not giving rides. Zooks was there giving rides. I tried to use my media, you know, angle and prowess to get a ride with them, but they said they were too busy, but I could go pick one up as just a general person of the public to find one. I did see a couple on my last day there. I was walking back to my hotel on the strip and I did see a couple, Zooks vehicles driving autonomously. I didn't see if there was anybody in there. I also saw emotional vehicle right after the Zooks ones, which I thought was interesting, but Zooks had a booth in the show as well. So yeah, it was, again, there was a ton of robotics there. How many of them were actually fully baked or on the path to being deployed in the real world at scale doing useful things? Most of them were not, right? Most of them were fun concepts, fun ideas, fun futuristic things, but again, that's what CES is. That's what CES has always been. So will I go back? I don't know, we'll see. We'll have to see what, you know, interesting things are being introduced to announce at the show next year. But again, Boston Dynamics was a huge reason for me going there. I think it was well worth it. I think again, kind of to me, like having done this for almost 15 years, I don't know. I just felt like it was an important part of the humanoid story to be there to see it. Mark Raypert was there, right? The founder of Boston Dynamics, again, working on these humanoids for some time. He's now over at the Robotics in AI Institute. So he was at the press conference for Hyundai. And again, CES is not his thing, if you know Mark at all. We bumped into each other and I said, I don't usually see you at this show. He goes, yeah, it's not my type of show. So for him to be there, for him to go outside of his comfort zone to be at that experience, I think to me, just shows you how important it was to him and to Boston Dynamics and to Hyundai. And I just thought that we should probably be there for that. But again, they have a lot of work to do to fulfill their promise. They'll tell you that in all these other humanoid companies have a long way to go as well. But overall, it was fun to be there. And I had not gotten sick, you and I talked about this. I cannot believe I don't have COVID. But you were sick and you were sick in December. So you already got inoculated, I think. Now you probably, my entire family was out for basically one of us at different times for the entire month of December. So you're probably right about that. Yeah. You know, especially walking through Eureka Park, which was a Eureka Park is the startup's dedicated startup area for CES. And they used to have a lot more robotic stuff there. It was hard to come across. They had dedicated pavilions for different countries and different universities and different economic development boards and stuff like that. Then they had food tech and home health and stuff like that. And robotics companies were just kind of mixed in to the different technology areas. So there was not a dedicated robotics area, which there used to be in the past. But it was disappointing from a startup robotics standpoint. But dude, when I was walking through there, I'm like, I'm going to. It's just all the while people in the basement, right? Yeah. And it's not big, right? So I'm like, there's no way I'm not coming out of this thing. And the thing about Eureka Park is that all those startups, they do a horrible job of promoting that they've got robotics. So the only way to find those robotics, it's like, it's a treasure hedge, you have to do a drive by the booth and like, oh, you have a robot. It's like, you know, in the program, it just says the name of the company, some Korean company, and that's all they put in there that you can't tell there's any robotics or what they're doing until you drive by and realize that it's something robotic. Right. But yeah, just again, to close out the, excuse me, CES discussion, there was some other products that people are excited about on the robotics front, Qualcomm released a new general purpose architecture for robotics. People are excited about that, you know, given maybe Nvidia a little bit of competition. There's a new sensor platform from a company like AI and its founders were, they used to work at, they used to work on Apple's depth sensing and perception technology, but I'm also co-founded and was chief technology officer at Prime Sense, which was the 3D sensing company that powered the Microsoft Connect. So they're, they're releasing a new platform that they claim, you know, addresses some structural problems when it comes to sensing for robotics. So I tried to connect with them, but didn't, wasn't able to do that. So hoping to connect with them after the show. So there's other developer-focused technologies that some folks are hoping are the real deal and we'll, we'll wait and see on that. But yeah, a fun time to see a bunch of, a bunch of cool robots and cool technologies again. How useful many of them will be is TBD, but that's what CES is, man, right? But thank you to everybody who was there who, you know, made some time to show and educate me about what they're working on and again to the people I bumped into and shouted to, good to see everybody, but yeah, we'll see if we're back next year. But before we get to the news of the week, Mike, why don't you tell us about this webinar that we have coming up on Wednesday, January 14th at noon, Eastern, where we're going to be doing a great panel discussion looking at the robotics industry outlook for 2026. >>Yeah, so I've got the first webinar of the year and it's a doozy. It's the 2026 robotics industry outlook. It's this coming Wednesday, January 14th, noon, Eastern. And I was able to recruit all Starcasts here. You know all of these voices, Aaron Prather, he's going to be there. He's the director of robotics and autonomous systems at ASTM for folks that don't know. And then we've got Robert Little, chief of robotics strategy at Nevada, Robert. Of course a huge voice in the industry for anybody on LinkedIn. And of course, a Jeff Bernstein president for A3. So between those three gentlemen, I'm going to try and keep them on task. But it's going to be a lively conversation about the state of the industry right now and what we think 2026 looks like. So it's one not to miss. So go sign up at therobotreport.com/webinars and so even if you're busy, go sign up because you can watch it on replay at your convenience. >>Only an hour long for all these three. >>Yeah, I've only got an hour, but we'll see what I can do in an hour with the three of them. >>Yeah. >>Good luck and Bob. Bob could talk by himself easily for an hour. >>I could talk to each one of them for an hour. >>Well, it could easily be a three hour webinar, but we'll keep it lively and contained. >>Yeah, yeah. Those guys are great. So thank you to Aaron, Bob, and Jeff for helping us out. And again, we'll be looking at challenges and opportunities for the entire robotics, each system in 2026, whether you're a robotics developer, a supplier, a user of some robot. This is going to be a great look and setting you up for what's going to happen this year. So again, go to therobotreport.com/webinars and sign up for the 2026 Robotics. Industry Outlook, this is free thanks to our sponsors. And yeah, hope to see you there. >>Hello, this is Artie Heinle. I am the CEO and founder of Starship, the delivery robot company. I'm best known in the past, by having been on the founding team of Skype. So built already one revolution in one industry and now doing the same in that industrial transportation. >>I see the only positives happening with robotics in 2026, I think robotics is growing up. Particular, the delivery robots and Starship in general, we are going to be developing and deploying as much as we can. We have launched a number of big partnerships like Uber Eats and other delivery apps and also major retailers in 2025 looking to sign up more of them during 2026. So what's this face? There's going to be more news. Robotics deployments used to be about pilots or autonomous riding deployments used to be about pilots. It's about launch here and there. But this state is more launches and now it is about launch and expansion. Launch expand, expand, expand to hundreds of locations and thousands of locations. That's what we are going to be doing in 2026. >>26 is going to be really big for Starship. Right now they have close to 3,000 robots but we are going to have way more than that. We are looking to have more than 10,000 robots in a couple of years and 2026 we are going to be marching towards that and that means deploying in hundreds of more locations with more and more retailers and telegraphs. We are expanding in U.S. we are expanding in Europe and potentially looking into Asia as well. All right, onto the news of the week and outside of CES there was a ton of news that happened. So again, thank you guys for holding down the fort while I was in Las Vegas and we have you folks covered with all the latest news and information about the global robotics industry on our websites, the robot report and automated warehouse. Make sure you sign up for our weekly newsletters. Make sure you follow those brands and you follow Mike Brianna, Eugene and myself on social media. There's no better way to stay up to date with what's going on in the industry than following those of us in the brands on Twitter or excuse me on LinkedIn. But where do you want to start? I think maybe the mentee acquisition mic was a good one because this obviously happened. I talked to a lot of people about this at CES and it's obviously humanoid related and autonomous vehicle related, but mobile eye, which is an autonomous vehicle company. They were owned by Intel at one point. I think they spun off recently or a few years ago as a standalone company. They acquired mentee robotics, which is working on humanoids and has been working on humanoids for a couple of years. They acquired mentee robotics for $900 million, including about $612 million in cash and the rest, it sounds like in class eight stock. But needless to say, for a number of different reasons, Mike, which maybe you can get into, this was quite a surprise. Yeah. So I covered this story early last week and you're right. I think it was a little bit shocking in terms of the costs, especially for this probably little known company, mentee robotics, developed humanoids. We followed them when they came out of stealth three years ago. So we were one of the first to drop that. A couple of things about both of these companies, and I think it sort of speaks to why this probably happened. Both of them are Israeli companies. In that sense, the CEO of Mobileye is a professor at Omnon Shashwai. He's the co-founder and CEO of Mobileye. He's also a co-founder of mentee. So he helped start that company with, I think, some of his students to get that company started. But he never formally ran the company. He was purely just set on the board after that. Mobileye has grown into one of the leading computer vision companies in machine learning technology for the automotive industry. They've probably been following what's been going on with mentee pretty closely. And now have made the decision to acquire that company and bring it under the fold of mobile eye. You know, it's hard to say exactly what the motivation was. It wasn't able to talk to them directly last week because they were, I think, they were all at the show as well at CES. But the fact that Shashwai is involved with both of those company, probably a pretty easy decision to either bring them in under the wing of mobile eye to help improve their financials. But also as the technology has evolved, right, to bring them to the point to further product eyes. And I think that's pretty much what I took out of the research here is that they're on the production development path now to product eyes, you know, what's really been a prototype development now for the last three years and begin to do that. And that's, you know, they pretty have a pretty pragmatic look in terms of their productization map here, trying to bring it to market here in the next two years with a, you know, commercialization in around the 2028. And they believe they'll be in the home, you know, closer to the 2030 timeframe. Yeah, a couple of things for me. Again, I saw this and someone at CES, I was talking to them about this in the booth in the morning. And then I got a message from this person later in the day saying that I'm not is co-founder of both companies. And to me, again, I don't know any, I don't have any, any backstory on this, but it's, to me, red flags kind of go off in a situation like that. I'm not, I guess I read something somewhere that said he was not involved in the board's decision. Well, I board had to decide whether they actually want to approve this requisite of mentee robotics. I did read somewhere that Amnon was not involved in that decision. He kind of excused himself from that decision-making process, yeah, which makes a lot of sense, right? But I mean, just you look at $900 million as a ton of money. And they're humanoid. If you look at some of the videos on their YouTube channel, doesn't seem nearly as sophisticated at this point in time as some of the other humanoid companies that are out there, however, those companies are probably way too expensive to acquire at this point in time, right? So I think all those things kind of point to why it would acquire a company like this. Yeah, I think it was just interesting and again, I don't know, I'm sure there's been other, whether it's robotics or not. And there's obviously other examples throughout our history where, you know, somebody who owns both companies has been involved in one company acquiring another, right? I'm sure that's happened before many times, but I just always question, like, how does that even happen? You know, how does that come about? Obviously, I would assume someone's pockets are being padded pretty nicely in a situation like that. Certainly, all the original investors and mentee cashed out, right? That's, or got traded in for more stock in mobile. So we'll see, but again, I think the play here is some mobile eye. I don't know how far along they are when it comes to their autonomous vehicles. Are they deployed commercially anywhere? Are they sort of in the testing case still? It's a development platform at this point, but they've got their roadmap, which is in the article on the robot report, which is what I'm not presented at CES last week. So there was a press conference last week where he talked about the acquisition, which is where I pulled a lot of the content from there in terms of their go-to-market. So 2026, they plan to have onsite proof-of-concept deployments later this year. They want to be in production next year with the first production version and a commercial rollout in 2028. And as they said, they expect, you know, home environment deployments by 2030, but, you know, they're not talking crazy numbers yet in terms of what they expect that volume to look like, just the fact that they aren't planning to be in the home until they prove the system in industry. You know, let's say they'll come back to one other thing. I mean, in an acquisition like this where, you know, you're acquiring a technology company, you have to expect that full disclosure that they completely understand the state of the technology, you know, the state of the production process, the opportunity, more than acquiring a third party where, you know, some there might be a little bit more obfuscation in terms of exactly how matured the technology is in here. We're talking about the AI in all the rest that's involved with making this real. So you have to expect their, they know what they're, what they know what they're buying, right? I would, maybe, yeah, maybe, I would think there's probably a lot to lose or a lot of issues that could come up if they were, you know, serious for this to happen. So yeah, I think you're probably right. And I think what the both companies have said is that they'll mutually benefit from one another and, you know, mobile, I can improve its machine learning techniques and mentee can also benefit and improve its machine learning techniques and physical AI approach. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, this was definitely a surprise because I get, when did you, I remember when, when did mentee come out of stealth, I remember it was like, wasn't that long ago, right? Yeah, it was a 2024 is merchant stealth in 2024. So I call it three years, but because they were, they were a year before they came out of stealth, year two before they came out of stealth, but they've only been out of stealth for since 2024, you know, I think it was mid-year, like June, May, June time from the 2024. All right. Well, we'll keep an eye on that one. Another acquisition, and we'll let you take this one, Mike, as I know, you know, these guys, Oshkosh, acquiring the core technology from Canvas, which was what a drywall finishing robot. That's right. So, you know, Oshkosh is one of those companies that's probably the biggest robotics company nobody's heard of. I know. Yeah, I thought they were the overall company. That was the first thing, and I had a chance to be on a panel of CS last year with one of their executives, and that's where I really learned about the company. And they're doing some amazing things in field robotics, specifically around airport automation, so they've got plans to commercialize airport automation. We've also introduced this Hair E robot, or the Haleable Autonomous Refuge robot, you know, robot designed to drive around a closed community and pick up trash. So imagine your retirement community, the robot can come to your door, and you just walk out and cross the cannon, and it goes to the next door kind of thing. So, you know, some very interesting automation technologies, consumer facing in the set that consumers would interact with, you know, the functionality of it, but not necessarily own, right, in that case. But again, this acquisition of a company like Canvas, which is very much a commercial application for drywallers, right, ability to prepare and finish drywall, very interesting technology, we've been close to them as well, but construction robotics is another market segment that's maturing, and so their flagship robot is the 1200 CX. And you know, so I think it fits nicely into the Oshkosh's portfolio and where they want to take their brand, going forward, Oshkosh outside of robotics is known for making fire trucks Steve and garbage trucks, so they're one of the top brands, US built top brands for those platforms for first responders and, you know, frontline workers, and so they know how to build big, heavy equipment that functions every day in extreme environments, right. In fact, I hear the trash truck outside of my front yard right now, if I can trash it up in the neighborhood at this moment, so it just reminds you that those types of systems have to be robust, they operate in extreme environments, you know, many hours a week. And so it fits nicely into the overall Oshkosh portfolio, I think, this acquisition. Yeah, and Oshkosh was at CES and had a pretty sizeable booth, yeah, probably had a big one. Yeah, demonstrating a bunch of these different robots. I don't think a canvas robot was there, I don't remember seeing one, but again, this deal was announced during CES, so, you know, they were probably finishing everything up at that point in time and who knows, but I don't remember seeing a drywalling robot at the show. I think I would have remembered that, but you never know. So cool. Well, keep an eye on that. And then finally, another acquisition, Mike, we got to do some more digging on this one, but I got a text message early, bright and early during CES one morning, it was like 6.30 in the morning about the steel, and now you guys were able to confirm it back in the office. But Amazon is acquiring Rightbot, which is what a trailer unloading product at Amazon. They had invested in the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, led an investment in this company Rightbot when it emerged from stealth in 2023. And probably, look, there's a number of competitors in this space. Boston Dynamics, we talked about already in the show, Slip Robotics, another example of a truck unloading technology, Pickle Robotics, Anywhere Robotics, Dexterity. Rightbot hasn't really been, you know, one of the names that we've talked about for this segment of robotics quite often, so it's curious to me, you know, why they would have chosen them over the others other than the fact that you said, led at the top of the story that they had an investment with the Amazon Industrial Fund. So they've been obviously looking at following and investing in this technology, but in terms of a market leader, I'm not sure that we saw this as one of the market leading technologies. And that's not down to downplay their capabilities or their maturity. It's just that we haven't had a lot of visibility. We haven't made a lot of noise about their successes, and so maybe they have been quietly working with Amazon with the eventual, you know, inclusion into the Amazon workflow, because God knows Amazon has a ton of trucks to load and load every day, right? Yeah, I got to follow up with that person who texted me to learn more about this. So we'll maybe have an update on this as we go. I did read somewhere else that maybe it's an acqui hire. Yeah, that could be true. Just kind of did that with, man, what was Peter or Beale's company there? I don't know. It should be co-variant. Co-variant. Yeah. Slick financial deal for co-variant to bring them in. So somebody, I read somewhere that maybe this is the same play here, and to me, that kind of seems right. You know, small team. We already invested a bunch of, you know, some money into them probably won't be that much more to bring them on board. Maybe they were excited by some early demos or discussions that they had with the team. Obviously, they must have been, but yeah, these other companies, you mentioned, are just way further along. You know, Amazon's not going to buy Boston Dynamics, pickle robots, probably too expensive at this point. I think they're announcing, was it UPS or FedEx is buying, I think, 400 robots from pickle robot for $120 million, yeah, UPS definitely coming of age, this application. So it's definitely coming of age, you know, so you wonder why I'm assuming, you know, Amazon Robotics is in the state of Massachusetts, as is pickle robot, as is Boston Dynamics. You know, they've tested all of these products, right? Slip Robotics anywhere, any trailer and loading system that's out there, you would think Amazon has tested in some way, shape or form. So I'm reason they're excited about this right bot company and have been for some time. So we'll do some more digging on that. But yeah, maybe it's an acqui hire, maybe their, you know, maybe this technology is still very early on, but they're excited by the people who are building it. And with Amazon's data and expertise in scaling robotic systems, maybe they just felt this was the best way to go. I don't know. But yeah, it was funny when I, when I was told about this, I went to write bot.com and their website did not work. Yeah. I was like, oh, that can't be a good sign, but maybe, you know, I'm sure that the deal's already done, right? So maybe they just took the website completely offline already, you know, the website goes nowhere. So those, those are just a few of the big stories from last week. Yeah, lots more that we cover. Yeah. We'll still be, you know, writing some stories about CES as well and everything else that's going on in the global robotics industry and there's a ton of stuff going on. So again, if you want to keep up to date with what's going on in the industry, make sure you subscribe to our newsletters, follow our websites, follow us on social media. Again, you can check us out at the robot report and automated warehouse. Any final thoughts, sir, before we sign off? Well, I think it's already looking at my inbox going to be another busy week of content. So I guess 2026 is already off of the bang and that's lots of lots of interesting things happening, which is great for the industry. So looking forward to strap in. Let's go. Yep. Here we go. We're off and running in 2026. Again, happy new year to everybody who's tuning in hope that the years off to a good start for you again, don't miss our 2026 robotics industry outlook webinar. That's taken place this Wednesday, January 14th at noon, Eastern Mike's going to be talking with Aaron, pray their Robert little and Jeff Bernstein about what's going on, both good and bad and everything in between for the robotics industry this year, really analyzing the trends they're going to shape the not only this year, but probably years to come. So again, go to the robot report dot com slash webinars. You can sign up for that webinar and all the other webinars that we're doing this year, webinars we did last year. We hope to see you on Wednesday afternoon, but that's going to do it for episode 226 of the show. Thank you again to everybody for tuning in. Thanks to Chris Matthew and Adi Heimler for being on the show today as well. New episodes of the robot report podcast drop each week. You can find us anywhere you listen to your podcast. Please subscribe. Leave us a rating. Give us a review. This episode was produced in the edited by Mike Oytsman, I'm Steve Curle. Thanks so much folks for tuning in. We'll talk to you again next week.