Outlook

Three transitions shape the near future: from programmed to learned, from the cage to shared space, and from industrial tool to a total geopolitical stake.

The ingredients are converging: VLA models, massive simulation, onboard computing, teleoperation data. But the bottleneck of movement data remains: between the viral demo and profitable deployment, there are often years.

2026 marks the move to scale: Figure, Tesla, Unitree, Wandercraft/Renault. The analogy that haunts strategists is the electric vehicle: Western scepticism, then Chinese industrial dominance.

The general-purpose home robot remains hard: expensive, partly teleoperated, intrusive. At the other end, open source bets that the home robot will be born the way the PC was: through tinkerers.

Waymo and Chinese players show that the first robot massively adopted by the public will not walk: it will drive. Europe is making it a regulatory and industrial test case.

Drone swarms, loitering munitions, autonomous vehicles: the race towards lethal autonomy is moving faster than its regulation. It is the heaviest risk of this entire programme.

Japan, Korea, China, Europe: ageing societies lack hands. Care, home help, hospitals and nursing homes will be very long-term markets, with major human dilemmas.

The United States dominates the brains, China dominates the bodies and is moving up towards the brains, and Europe keeps its industrial excellence and a narrow window with Renault-Wandercraft and Hugging Face/Pollen.