What is Actuate 26 and why it deserves attention

Actuate 26 is a developer conference focused purely on robotics and physical AI, organized by startup Foxglove. It takes place on August 18–19, 2026 at the Fort Mason fortress in San Francisco. Unlike large tech fairs dominated by product presentations and marketing slogans, Actuate is built on technical talks, workshops, and live demos from engineers who actually program robots and deploy them into production.

This year, organizers expect more than 1,000 attendees from companies across the entire spectrum of robotics: autonomous vehicles, drones, humanoids, defense systems, construction, logistics, industrial automation, maritime autonomy, and agriculture. Ticket prices start at $299 for expo floor access, with full access to all talks costing $799.

Star-studded speaker lineup

The list of speakers shows just how much physical AI has grown over the past year. Among the headliners you'll find:

• Alex Kendall — co-founder and CEO of Wayve, a British startup developing autonomous driving based on end-to-end learning directly from camera data. Wayve recently expanded into the US and is testing its systems in real-world operations.
• Chris Urmson — co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Aurora Innovation. Urmson previously led the autonomous vehicle project at Google and now with Aurora targets autonomous trucking — in 2026, the company is already running commercial driverless trips.
• Chelsea Finn — co-founder of Physical Intelligence, one of the hottest startups in robotic manipulation. Finn is also a Stanford professor and among the most-cited researchers in the field of robot learning.
• Keenan Wyrobek — co-founder and CTO of Zipline, a company that delivers medical supplies using drones. Zipline operates in several African countries as well as the US and has already completed over a million commercial flights.
• Nathan Michael — CTO of Shield AI, a defense startup developing autonomous combat systems including an AI-powered fighter jet. The company recently secured a Pentagon contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Carolina Parada — vice president of robotics at Google DeepMind, leading the development of Gemini robotic models for the physical world.
• Sanja Fidler — vice president of AI research at Nvidia, heading the GR00T project — a universal model for humanoid robots.

Other speakers include representatives from Cobot, Saronic, Bedrock Robotics, Dyna Robotics, Multiply Labs, Genesis AI, Sunday, Andromeda, Dexory, and more.

From demo to production: the main theme of 2026

Adrian Macneil, co-founder and CEO of Foxglove, put it plainly: "Physical AI has already left the lab and entered the real world, but scaling it is now the main challenge for the entire industry."

This sentence captures exactly what troubles most robotics companies today. Building a single functional prototype is relatively easy — as evidenced by the flood of humanoid robot videos on social media. But getting a fleet of hundreds or thousands of robots into reliable operation requires a completely different infrastructure: collecting and processing massive amounts of data, simulations, real-time debugging, remote management, and most importantly — the ability to learn from every mistake.

Foxglove is betting on this need with its platform for agentic data management — a system that enables robotics teams to collect, organize, and analyze data from the entire fleet and use it to improve autonomous behavior. At the conference, the company will present its vision of an "agentic data platform for physical AI."

What it means for Europe and the Czech Republic

Although the conference takes place in San Francisco, its impact reaches Europe. The EU AI Act, which came into effect in 2024 and is being gradually implemented, will have a significant impact on how quickly European companies can deploy autonomous systems. The regulation classifies "high-risk" AI systems — among which autonomous vehicles and robots in public spaces undoubtedly belong — under stricter oversight.

For Czech companies involved in industrial automation and robotics, this is an important signal. The Czech Republic has a strong tradition in industrial robotics and automation — companies like ABB, FANUC or local integrators such as VÚTS and Blumenbecker face similar challenges as the firms at Actuate 26. And the emerging Czech AI Factory in Ostrava could in the future provide computing capacity for training physical AI models.

Moreover, several prominent robotics startups operate in Europe — German NEURA Robotics, which recently raised a record 35 billion CZK from investors including Nvidia and Amazon, or Swiss ANYbotics focused on autonomous inspection robots. Conferences like Actuate 26 show that the gap between American and European robotics is widening — not in fundamental research, but in the speed of commercialization and scaling.

Program: technical details, not marketing

The first day's agenda (August 18) includes a keynote by Nathan Michael of Shield AI, presentations by Sunday Robotics on autonomous home robots, Burro on robotics in agriculture, and Dyna Robotics on foundation models for robots. The afternoon features a fireside chat with Chris Urmson of Aurora and a Google DeepMind talk on robotics powered by large models.

The second day (August 19) opens with Chelsea Finn of Physical Intelligence, followed by technical presentations on simulations (Genesis AI), autonomous construction (Bedrock Robotics), and robotic dexterity (Eka Robotics). The afternoon fireside chat with Alex Kendall of Wayve concludes with Sanja Fidler of Nvidia delivering a keynote on the future of AI models for the physical world.

Conference sponsors include Nvidia as well as Uber AI Solutions, Avala, Anyscale, LiveKit, Nebius, Ouster, and others. The expo floor will feature live demonstrations of robots and development tools.

Why now?

2026 is a turning point for physical AI. Nvidia introduced Cosmos 3 this spring — a platform for training robotic models in simulations. OpenAI invested in startup 1X Technologies and is reportedly building its own hardware team. Tesla continues developing the Optimus humanoid, which is expected to begin working in its own factories this year. And China's AgiBot launched commercial humanoid rentals in 14 countries.

At the same time, pressure is mounting for robots to be more than just "cool YouTube demos" and actually make money. Companies like Aurora and Zipline are already generating commercial revenue. Wayve is expanding testing to new cities. And that is precisely the moment Actuate 26 captures: the transition from "it works" to "it pays off."