In our new monthly series, we showcase a selection of robotics stories from society, business, research, and culture, as we track the field’s ongoing journey from specialized industrial machines to an increasingly visible social phenomenon.
Oh, Vienna
June opened with ICRA 2026, IEEE RAS’s flagship robotics and automation conference, held in Vienna from June 1–5 under the theme “Robots for All.”
The conference included technical sessions, workshops, tutorials, exhibitions and robot competitions, with applied challenges spanning areas such as grasping, manipulation, autonomous racing and embodied AI. There were panels on the state of robotics publishing, sustainability showcases and award winning papers.
Verity, a warehouse inventory automation company, won the prestigious 2026 IERA Award. Verity uses autonomous indoor drones to provide its logistics and retail clients with inventory data and warehouse racking inspection capabilities.
Verity, a Swiss company specializing in autonomous indoor drone systems for warehouse inventory, won the prestigious 2026 IERA Award. Its drones are used by logistics and retail clients to gather inventory data and inspect warehouse racking.
Stay tuned to the IEEE RAS website for a forthcoming interview with Verity co-founder Markus Waibel and with multiple best paper award winners.
Industrial robots on the rise
New numbers from the International Federation of Robotics show that the U.S. robot industry returned to double-digit growth in 2025, with industrial robot installations rising 11% year on year to 38,000 units.
Credit: IFR
Automotive remains the largest adopter, with 13,500 installations, but robust growth in the food industry and other non-manufacturing sectors is probably the most interesting finding, with installations in the food industry surging by 30% to around 3,000 units. Metal and machinery and electrical-electronics also saw ~3,000 installations in 2025.
The IFR figures also noted that the U.S. now has 307 industrial robots in use for every 10,000 manufacturing employees, ranking eighth worldwide. China, meanwhile, remains the world’s largest industrial robot market by volume, with 295,000 annual installations in 2024, accounting for 54% of the global market.
Humanoid robots grab most of the headlines, despite questions about their safety, reliability and efficiency.
Credit: IFR
Meanwhile, day after day, traditional industrial robots continue to improve uptime, boost throughput, and provide return on investment, using technologies that are for the most part, already proven in production.
This is not to say that humanoid robots will never meet their commercial promises. Nor is it to say that traditional industrial automation deployments are always unproblematic.
But for now at least, one of the biggest cultural differences between traditional industrial robots and humanoids may be that we tend to see the former as tools and nothing more – there is no attribution of agency, no anthropomorphism, and no uncanny valley. They are the machines we are used to.
Automate 2026
June also saw the Automate trade show, held in Chicago. This year’s event was the largest ever with an estimated 50,000 registrants and over 1,000 exhibitors across more than 450,000 square feet of exhibit space. There were humanoids, of course, but the show was dominated by traditional robot arms, cobots, machine vision solutions, and most of all by physical AI, with many companies showcasing solutions that use software, vision, simulation and/or learning systems to help robots perceive, adapt and act more flexibly in real industrial environments.
The event also saw Hiroshi Fujiwara receive the 2026 Engelberger Robotics Award, recognizing his work as Executive Director of the Japan Robot Association and his broader contribution to the global robotics industry.
Something Fishy
Far from the world of industrial robotics, researchers at Cambridge University developed a fish-like robot designed to explore how some modern fish move on land, and what that might reveal about one of the major transitions in evolutionary history.
The team combined observations of living walking fish, computer modelling and a physical robot to identify an ‘undulating tripod gait’.
There was significant trial and error involved, as lead author Dr Michael Ishida explains:
“We tried all kinds of different gaits on the robot, and every other gait we tried was slower. Any time we changed how the body bent, or what sequence it was bent in, it was worse. It was surprising that the optimal walking pattern in the simulation and robot matched what the real fish actually do.”
In an undulating tripod gait, the fish uses its front fins or head for support while its body and tail push it forward. The researchers found similar patterns across unrelated walking fish species. Find the team’s full Nature Communications paper here.
Football frenzy
Stunning last-minute winners. Delirious fans. Dubious dives. Yes, RoboCup 2026 is about to kick off at the end of June in Incheon, South Korea. The event is expected to bring together more than 3,000 competitors, researchers, students, and professionals from dozens of countries, alongside 15,000 visitors. We’ll have coverage next month.
In the meantime, as AP News reported, the FIFA World Cup is also seeing widespread robot deployments, primarily for security purposes:
Overseeing the sprawling security apparatus is a legion of federal agencies, state and local police departments and private entities. […] Their tools include hunter drones that can shoot nets over objects in restricted airspace, bag-inspecting robot dogs, giant X-ray trucks and thousands of AI-powered cameras trained on public spaces.
Reuters reported that The Trump administration has reportedly spent US$250 million since December 2025 on addressing drone threats to the World Cup, and that US agencies have seized more than 300 drones near World Cup sites so far.
Have a robotics story, research paper or topic area you’d like to see covered in a future roundup? Drop us a line at [email protected]
Emmet Cole, Science communicator
