May and June were big months for robotics in the United States. As flowers bloomed outside, actuators rose in the convention halls of Boston, Detroit, Houston, and Atlanta. While there have been many good articles on each of these events, with numerous postings of new humanoids and co-bots in action, I would like to share some observations as an insider with nearly a decade of attendance at two very different shows: Automate and Xponential. On a personal note, since starting this article, uncrewed systems that were demoed on the floors of these shows weeks earlier have now been deployed globally on battlefields and even on parade grounds in Washington, DC.

U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary parade with robot dogs leading the celebration on June 14, 2025.

Detroit, in its heyday, was the fourth-largest city in the United States, manufacturing 75% of the country’s automobiles. Today, its rank has fallen to 27, claiming one of the lowest per capita incomes in the United States and producing fewer than 20% of our cars. Last month, as I walked the halls of Automate with robot arms in trade show booths vibrating, spinning, and compressing their loud motors, I left with the feeling that the Motor City could be experiencing an urban renaissance led by the A3, or the Association for Advancing Automation.

As Jeff Burnstein, A3’s president, exclaimed at the show when asked about the impact of robots on jobs: “Our data across a 30-year period tells us that robots are helping to save and create jobs. When robot sales increase, employment also rises, and vice versa. The real risk to jobs is when companies can’t compete, as we see from the empty factories that are so visible right here in Detroit. Advances in technology mean jobs will be different. But that’s always been the case: 30 years ago, there was no such thing as a digital marketing manager or search engine optimization specialist. Robots are tools to help companies improve productivity, increase quality, speed time to market, and ultimately win more business and hire more people. The jobs of the future will be better, safer, and higher paying.”

As I mentioned in my post last year, Automate has grown up. What started as a dog-leg of ProMat is now its own annual show. This year marked the first time Burnstein’s organization hosted a yearly summit, and already it has outgrown Detroit’s convention center, with over 45,000 attendees crowding the space. (Note: Automate returns to the Windy City in 2026, taking over McCormick Place.) This year, not a single corner of the massive trade show floor remained open. For four days, robots reigned supreme over the city, with every manufacturer making the pilgrimage to see the latest technology that would advance their domestic workflows amid a trade war. I witnessed this firsthand while working the booth of my portfolio company, Cambrian Robotics, with a steady stream of automotive engineers arriving on tour buses to catch a glimpse of AI-infused 3D computer vision technology.

Cambrian Robotics booth video of AI-computer vision demonstrating wire harness insertion tasks at Automate 2025

Cambrian’s suite of workflow applications, utilizing a wide range of OEM robot arms, garnered significant attention from prospective users. Automotive executives marveled at the speed and ease of their brake assembly, metal-hinge bin picking, and transparent objects pick-and-place. The biggest draw and probably Automate’s best show winner, even surpassing Agility’s humanoids, was Cambrian’s two-arm UR wire harness and insertion demo (video above). This example illustrates the current capabilities of LLMs in the field of robotics. This simulation feasibility study trains robots in even more scenarios than they will encounter in the real world, thus enabling the quick deployment of deterministic, mission-driven systems that complete the job, regardless of manipulation mishaps. This new wave of AI-driven products was not limited to Cambrian or other computer vision offerings, but was a general theme of this year’s show.

The Automate Startup Challenge winner, Brennand Pierce of Kinisi (2nd from the right), with judges from left to right: Sean Simpson/NewLab Ventures, Lisa Chai/Interwoven Ventures, Oliver Mitchell/ffVC, Britton Winterrose/Microsoft, and Christi DeCuir/Nvidia

I’ve judged the Automate startup competition almost consistently since the show’s inception. This year may have been the most impressive group of startups, including one backed by robotic luminary Daniel Theobald. The cohort included numerous companies utilizing foundational AI models to push the envelope of robotics. Two standouts were Kinisi (the winner) and Nexus Intelligence (my runner up). Kinisi is a wheel-based two-armed humanoid-like robot with a small head appendage that hinges up and down. Nine months earlier, the founder Brennand Pierce, posted on LinkedIn about his newest product, which utilizes OpenAI to learn new behaviors.

Kinisi, Automate Startup Challenge winner, featuring a demo of their humanoid-like robot.

As Pierce boasted, “Check out my new robot in action. The key takeaway from the video is that all the robot’s behaviors are generated by the LLM. It only knows a few basic functions: open/close gripper, move arm, and process input from the vision pipeline. From these, it can interpret my voice commands and combine them into more complex tasks. In this example, it passes me a ‘cold drink’ by recognizing a can of Coke in front of it.”

Nexus, a deserving honorable mention, developed a generative AI platform to connect industrial automation control systems, such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), to co-pilot programming platforms, thereby speeding up integrations.

I’m sobered by Rodney Brooks’ view on LLMs, expressed last year in TechCrunch, “People say, ‘Oh, the large language models are gonna make robots be able to do things they couldn’t do.’ That’s not where the problem is. The problem with being able to do stuff is about control theory and all sorts of other hardcore math optimization.” He adds optimistically, “It’s not useful in the warehouse to tell an individual robot to go out and get one thing for one order, but it may be useful for eldercare in homes for people to be able to say things to the robots.”

Hosting a Defense Tech panel with Dan Madden/Squadra Ventures and Jacqueline Blackburn/Decisive Point

Moving from Detroit, I landed in Houston (the current fourth-largest American city) for AUVSI’s Xponential to host a panel on Defense Tech. Similar to Automate, this show has exploded with new commercial exhibits and applications filling the entire George R. Brown Convention Center. Since attending this show nearly a decade ago, I’ve noticed a shift in attendee demographics, with a growing number of commercial buyers and partners now outnumbering uniformed military personnel and public service officers. In fact, it is now promoted as “the largest trade show & conference for both commercial and defense UAVs, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.” While the space was filled with eVTOLs, winged UAVs, terrestrial robots, and numerous new marine innovations, the busiest part of the show was still the Defense Tech theater.

Since the launch of the Defense Innovation Unit by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, the relationship between the startup community and the military has evolved, empowering warfighters with less expensive mobile, uncrewed systems, such as drones and packbots, outside the traditional supply chains of Defense Primes. Ironically, global conflicts have become advertisements for the success of new upstarts in this fast-moving environment, from Ukrainian drone companies on display in Houston (that destroyed Russian bombers weeks later) to Israeli cyber technologies that are attracting $100 million seed round funding from top-tier firms like Lux Capital and Sequoia. I asked Madden and Blackburn their views on how a generation raised on ChatGPT will change the internal operations in the DoD. They retorted that this is what their funds are banking on with their portfolios within the robotics, drone, and intelligence arenas.

Earlier this month, defense tech startup Anduril raised a $2.5 billion Series G round, doubling its valuation to $30.5 billion. According to TechCrunch, the round was 8x oversubscribed, with many investors being turned away. This raise highlights the potential for the defense tech market, particularly in the realm of autonomy.

As founder and CEO, Palmer Luckey, recently shared with the WSJ, “So we’re building a lot of different things, but I’d say the thing that is going to dominate capacity is going to be autonomous fighter jets. We are building an autonomous fighter jet for the United States Air Force called Fury for the CCA program, Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. This is a really big win that Anduril had last year, where we were competing against a number of different companies, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing. We beat the big guys and managed to convince the Air Force that we were the ones who are going to be able to build the best autonomous fighter jet and that we were going to be able to build them in a scale of thousands of units on a timeline that is relevant to a potential fight in the Pacific with China.”

Autonomous fighter jets are like drones on steroids, led by a startup that didn’t exist eight years ago. I’m looking forward to attending next year’s Xponential, which will be held in Detroit.

My book launch at MassRobotics with Marita McGinn during Boston’s Robotics Tech Week.

I ended my robotics trade show season in Boston, attending Fady Saad’s Robotics Invest. While Cybernetix is not the only sponsoring entity, it is their brainchild. Fady curated a fantastic group of panelists and guests, with three ff Venture Capital portfolio companies in attendance this year: PlusOne Robotics, Cambrian Robotics, and Burro. The event also took place during the first-ever Robotics Tech Week in Beantown. I was privileged to launch my book tour at MassRobotics with 100 in attendance, sponsored by Lowenstein Sandler. In many ways, the interviews in my Startup Field Guide parallel the growth of the industry from Mick Mountz’s revolution in e-commerce fulfillment to Nic Radford’s latest humanoid invention. Who knows? Maybe the next unicorn founder walked out with a signed copy of A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI to begin their own robo-adventure.