Literally crowded by robots! 🎃 Having an interview with the CEO of one of the biggest robotics companies globally, while standing on their mobile robot wasn't on my bingo for 2026, but I'll take it all day long! I was recently at KUKA HQ in Augsburg to meet with Christoph Schell. The CEO of a company that has more than 600,000 robots deployed worldwide. I asked what has to change for a 50-person company to deploy a robot as easily as it buys software. He explained that it becomes a platform decision: which platform lets you combine deterministic programming with systems programmed autonomously. Also his framing of the shift was more conservative than most of what you hear right now. Physical AI is not going to take over the deterministic world. The two coexist. That is what KUKA AMP is for, the Automation Management Platform they showed at GTC in March. It sits between AI agents and hardware: → semantics, so an agent reasons about outcomes instead of device-specific commands → actions, one standardised command set across robots, AMRs and cells → data, state streams feeding closed-loop optimisation → an embedded digital twin running the loop Then I asked what you actually lose when you lose market share in our robotics space. He called it an outcome rather than a goal, and then said the thing I keep coming back to: customers in China, Europe and the US all want the same thing, but in China they have gone beyond lab and R&D projects and are deploying deterministic paired with autonomous systems at scale, in factories. And the differentiator was the platform (rather than technology), plus a team that knows how to build a cell, build a line, manage the data. Which answers my first question better than my question deserved. The robot was never the hard part. More from KUKA coming, especially this week as GTC by @NVIDIARobotics comes to Berlin, so stay tuned! 💚🧡 ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

There are more companies selling robot intelligence right now than companies selling robots.  That showed up this year as a pattern I kept noticing.  In this case all these research groups with published on the same robot from @DexmateAI. DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics 2 launch video. Amazon FAR’s real-world RL on a dexterous humanoid. DUET, the dual-robot manipulation framework from USC, Stanford and TRI. A 100-hour tactile dataset from Berkeley, NVIDIA and Stanford. World Labs’ Atlas launch. And a Mayo Clinic residency track, which is not a robotics lab at all. The platform in all of them is Vega, from Dexmate. Models, VLAs, data engines, simulators, teleop stacks: that side of the market is crowded. The side that will sell a lab a capable bimanual mobile robot, this quarter, at a published price, is thin. So a team with a policy to validate either waits on a partnership or spends a year building a platform that was never the point of the paper. Dexmate sells the platform. Look at what the spec sheet commits to, and what it refuses: → Vega 1 Pro, $75,000 at this year’s pricing, roughly four weeks from order → 24 DoF, torso from floor to 2.2 m, 5 kg per arm, omni base, ~20 h per charge → Jetson AGX Thor, stereo head, two LiDAR, four base cameras → Python, C++ and Rust APIs in the box → SimReady URDF and USD models matching the shipped robot Not the model company, not the data company, not the simulation company. The thing they run on. Congrats @taochenshh, @qinyuzhe and the team! :) ~~  ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

Company that deploys robots Distribution proves again that it’s one of the most valuable thing in robotics business