HUMANOID ROBOT FORUM AGENDA

Humanoid robots are already working — assembling electronics, moving goods, and learning tasks that didn't exist in their training data. The race to build general-purpose robots that can adapt, reason, and act in the real world is no longer theoretical. It's happening right now.

But the hardest questions are still wide open. How do customers tap into powerful foundation models without giving up their operational IP? How do integrators bridge the gap while safety standards are still evolving? Can digital twins shrink integration cycles and close the sim-to-real gap? And will humanoids overcome the interoperability challenges that stalled earlier automation — or will their reasoning capability finally change the equation?

Join a panel of experts at the frontier of humanoid robotics as they tackle the challenges facing customers and integrators today — and explore how an open ecosystem is accelerating what's possible tomorrow.

Humanoid robots have long captured our imagination. Interest has skyrocketed along with the perception that robots are getting closer to taking on a wide range of labor-intensive tasks. What is driving this vision is not a preference for the human form but a recognition that humans are generalists—adaptable, quick to learn, and effortlessly retaskable.

This stands in contrast with decades of industrial automation, which have led to enormous gains in productivity by narrowing the scope of solutions to well-bounded tasks. However, designing systems that can scale economically to address the high diversity and stiff requirements of industrial labor tasks remains a significant open challenge.

Join us as we reflect on what we’ve learned by observing factory floors, and why we’ve grown convinced that chasing generalization in manipulation—both in hardware and behavior—isn’t just interesting, but necessary. We’ll discuss AI research threads we’re exploring at Boston Dynamics to push this mission forward, and highlight opportunities our field should collectively invest more in to turn the humanoid vision and the reinvention of manufacturing into a practical, economically viable product.

This session will explore the development of safety standards for humanoid robots, focusing on the challenges and considerations required to ensure safe operation in both industrial and public spaces.

At Humanoid Forum during Automate Show, David Reger, Founder and CEO of NEURA Robotics, presents a decisive shift in industrial automation: from programmed machines to learning, adaptive systems powered by Physical AI.

Today’s factories are constrained by fragmented hardware, siloed software, and costly integration. Automation works – but only within narrow, pre-defined boundaries. Physical AI changes that. By combining a full-spectrum hardware portfolio – from cobots to humanoid robots – with a unified software and data backbone, NEURA enables machines to perceive, learn, and operate in dynamic, real-world environments.

Central to this approach is the Neuraverse: a continuously evolving ecosystem where every deployed robot contributes data back into the system. Through the NEURA Gym and a fast growing partner network, real industrial tasks become training ground for intelligence. The result is a compounding advantage: each deployment reduces integration effort, shortens ramp-up time, and improves performance across all others.

This keynote will move beyond vision to impact:

How Physical AI addresses labor shortages, increases flexibility in high-mix production, and unlocks automation in environments that were previously too complex or variable.

The future of industry is not just automated – it is adaptive. And the competitive edge will belong to those who learn fastest.

Humanoids have captured our attention, garnered significant investment and started to work in warehouses and manufacturing facilities. The next five years represent a critical inflection point for humanoid robots as we begin to enter early mass production. And, the next five years will determine if humanoids can live up to the hype. What will get us to more widespread adoption? How do we move to general-purpose systems that can adapt to multiple diverse tasks in unstructured human environments? What will hold us back? All this and more with Agility CTO Pras Velagapudi.

Dexterous manipulation remains a key bottleneck in humanoid robotics, limiting how effectively robots can interact with the real world. This panel explores advances in robotic hands, tactile sensing, and AI-driven control. The discussion will highlight how breakthroughs in physical AI are enabling more adaptive, capable manipulation across real-world applications.

The path to scalable, general-purpose humanoid robots. This session explores how embodied AI is enabling robots to learn, adapt, and operate effectively in the real world.

The path to commercial viability for humanoid robotics depends on intentional market sequencing, not spectacle. While popular imagination places humanoids in the home, economics and technical realities suggest heavy industry will be the first landing point for this new category of technology.

In this fireside conversation, we introduce a structured framework for assessing industry-level readiness for humanoid deployment. By examining labor cost pressure, workforce scarcity, task structure, environmental predictability, and technological feasibility, we can objectively assess industry readiness for humanoid deployment. When viewed through this lens, heavy industry and industrial applications emerge as the most rational and near-term commercialization pathways.

Identifying the right market is only the first step. Even in industries where the economics are compelling, no enterprise is operationally ready to deploy humanoids today. The gap between "this makes sense" and "we're deploying robots" is filled with real-world challenges: IT integration, power infrastructure, safety certification, workforce planning, and internal business case development

This session will explore why humanoid adoption will begin in high-cost labor environments — not consumer settings — how proper go-to-market sequencing will determine which companies lead the next era of robotics, and a framework for thinking about what it actually takes to make an enterprise humanoid-ready.

Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how economic fundamentals, not science fiction narratives, will shape the first wave of humanoid deployment.

Most robots still struggle once they leave the factory floor. In controlled environments, automation thrives because every variable is predictable, but the real world is messy. Construction sites shift daily, energy facilities are exposed to weather and terrain, and logistics yards are crowded with moving people and equipment. These dynamic conditions break the assumptions most robotic systems rely on, forcing them to depend on GPS, maps, or human oversight. As a result, large-scale autonomous deployment has remained slow and risky. Until now.

In this session, Dr. Ali Agha, Founder and CEO of FieldAI, shares how his team is tackling this problem with a “physics-first,” risk-aware approach to robotic intelligence.

Rather than confining robots to predictable factory settings, this new generation of autonomy extends their capabilities to complex, unstructured environments. It’s enabling real-world impact, from reducing downtime and increasing efficiency in logistics to improving worker safety on energy sites and construction projects. By equipping robots to understand and adapt to the physical world just as a human would, FieldAI is redefining what “deployable autonomy” looks like.

Dr. Agha will walk through real-world examples of robots now operating autonomously in high-risk, labor-intensive settings, from construction and logistics to energy infrastructure, and explain what it takes to move from controlled testing to large-scale field deployment.

Attendees will learn:
Why risk-aware decision-making is essential for robots operating in unstructured environments
Key lessons from scaling robotic systems across multiple platforms and industries
How continuous, real-world learning drives safer and more reliable autonomy

This session is for technical leaders and engineers who are pushing automation beyond structured environments and want practical insight into building autonomy that works in the physical world.

Everyone talks about the hardware and the AI. Jon talks about everything else from the facility design to the workflow re-engineering, the change management, and the data infrastructure. A conversation about why the most sophisticated physical AI systems still fail in the real world, and what it actually takes to make them stick.

Humanoid robots are moving rapidly from research labs into real-world applications, but key questions remain about their path to scale, capability, and adoption. This panel brings together industry leaders to explore what’s coming next—from breakthroughs in AI and hardware to commercialization strategies and real-world deployment challenges.