It’s been 24 years since CNET first published an article with the headline “The robots are coming.” It’s a phrase I’ve repeated in my own writing over the years — mostly in jest. But now in 2026, for the first time, I feel confident in declaring that the robots have finally arrived.
I kicked off this year, as I often do, wandering the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and its hotel-based outposts on the lookout for the technology set to define the next 12 months. CES has always been a hotbed of activity for robots, but more often than not, a robot that makes a flashy Vegas debut doesn’t go on to have a rich, meaningful career in the wider world.
In fact, as cute as they often are and as fun as they can be to interact with on the show floor, most robots I’ve seen at CES over the years amount to little more than gimmicks. They either come back year after year with no notable improvements or are never seen or heard from again.
In more than a decade of covering the show, I’ve been waiting for a shift to occur. In 2026, I finally witnessed it. From Hyundai unveiling the final product version of the Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid robot in its press conference to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s focus on “physical AI” during his keynote, a sea change was evident this year in how people were talking about robots.
Watch this: Atlas Has Left the Lab! In-Person Demo of Boston Dynamics Humanoid
“We’ve had this dream of having robots everywhere for decades and decades,” Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation, told me on the sidelines of the chipmaker’s vast exhibition at the glamorous Fontainebleau Hotel. “It’s been in sci-fi as long as we can remember.”
Throughout the show, I felt like I was watching that sci-fi vision come to life. Everywhere I went, I was stumbling upon robot demos (some of which will be entering the market this year) drawing crowds, like the people lining up outside Hyundai’s booth to see the new Atlas in action.
So what’s changed? Until now, “we didn’t have the technology to create the brain of a robot,” Lebaredian said.
AI has unlocked our ability to apply algorithms to language, and it’s being applied to the physical world, changing everything for robots and those who make them.
The physical AI revolution
What truly makes a robot a robot? Rewind to CES 2017: I spent my time at the show asking every robotics expert that question, sparked by the proliferation of autonomous vehicles, drones and intelligent smart home devices.
This exercise predated the emergence of generative AI and models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but already I could see that by integrating voice assistants into their products, companies were beginning to blur the boundaries of what could be considered robotics.
Not only has the tech evolved since that time, but so has the language we use to talk about it. At CES 2026, the main topic of conversation seemed to be “physical AI.” It’s an umbrella term that can encompass everything from self-driving cars to robots.
“If you have any physical embodiments, where AI is not only used to perceive the environment, but actually to take decisions and actions that interact with the environment around it … then it’s physical AI,” Ahmed Sadek, head of physical AI and vice president of engineering at chipmaker Qualcomm told me.
Autonomous vehicles have been the easiest expression of physical AI to build so far, according to Lebaredian, simply because their main challenge is to dodge objects rather than interact with them. “Avoiding touching things is a lot easier than manipulating things,” he said.
Still, the development of self-driving vehicles has done much of the heavy lifting on the hardware, setting the stage for robot development to accelerate at a rapid pace now that the software required to build a brain is catching up.
For Nvidia, which worked on the new Atlas robot with Boston Dynamics, and Qualcomm, which announced its latest robotics platform at CES, these developments present a huge opportunity.
But that opportunity also extends to start-ups. Featured prominently at the CES 2026 booth of German automotive company Schaeffler was the year-and-a-half-old British company Humanoid, demonstrating the capabilities of its robot HMND 01.
The wheeled robot was built in just seven months, Artem Sokolov, Humanoid’s CEO, told me, as we watch it sort car parts with its pincerlike hands. “We built our bipedal one for service and household much faster — in five months,” Sokolov said.
Humanoid’s speed can be accounted for by the AI boom plus an influx of talent recruited from top robotics companies, said Sokolov. The company has already signed around 25,000 preorders for HMND 01 and completed pilots with six Fortune 500 companies, he said.
This momentum extends to the next generation of Humanoid’s robots, where Sokolov doesn’t foresee any real bottlenecks. The main factors dictating the pace will be improvements in AI models and making the hardware more reliable and cost effective.
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