I’ve seen it with my own eyes: robots are here and walking among us

It’s been 24 years since CNET made its debut Published an article With the title Robots Are Coming. It’s a phrase I’ve repeated in my writing over the years – often as a joke. But now in 2026, for the first time, I feel confident in declaring that robots have finally arrived.

I began this year, as I often do, by roaming the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center and its hotel locations in search of the technology that is set to define the next 12 months. CES It’s always been a hotbed of robotics activity, but more often than not, a robot that makes its debut in Vegas doesn’t go on to have a rich, meaningful career in the wider world.

In fact, as cute as they are often and as fun as they can be to interact with on the show floor, most of the robots I’ve seen at CES over the years are little more than gimmicks. They either return year after year with no noticeable improvements or are never seen or heard from again.

During more than a decade of covering the show, I’ve been waiting for the transformation to happen. In 2026, she finally witnessed it. From Hyundai unveils the final product version of Boston Dynamics Robot Atlas In his press conference for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s focus on ‘physical AI’ During his keynote, the dramatic change this year in how people talk about robots was evident.

“We’ve had this dream of having robots everywhere for decades and decades,” Pastor Lepardian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation at Nvidia, told me on the sidelines of the chipmaker’s massive exhibition at the glamorous Fontainebleau Hotel. “It’s been in science fiction for as long as we can remember.”

Throughout the show, I felt like I was watching this sci-fi vision come to life. Everywhere I went, I found robot demos (some of which will hit the market this year) drawing crowds, like the people lining up outside Hyundai’s booth to watch the new Atlas in action.

So what has changed? “Until now, we didn’t have the technology to create a robot brain,” Libaridian said.

AI has unleashed our ability to apply algorithms to language, and it is being applied to the physical world, changing everything for robots and those who make them.

The physical AI revolution

What makes a robot really a robot? Rewind to CES 2017: I spent my time at the show Ask this question to every expert in the field of roboticswhich resulted from the spread of self-driving vehicles, drones, and smart home devices.

This exercise was preceded by the emergence of generative AI and models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but I can already see that by incorporating voice assistants into their products, companies are starting to blur the boundaries of what can be considered bots.

Not only has technology evolved since then, 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 include everything from self-driving cars to robots.

“If you have any physical incarnations, where the AI ​​is not just used to perceive the environment, but actually to make decisions and actions that interact with the surrounding environment…it’s physical AI,” Ahmed Sadiq, head of physical AI and vice president of engineering at chipmaker Qualcomm, told me.

Self-driving vehicles have been the easiest expression of physical AI built to date, according to Libaridian, simply because their main challenge is dodging objects rather than interacting with them. “It’s much easier to avoid touching things than to manipulate them,” he said.

However, the development of autonomous vehicles has created a lot of heavy lifting on hardware, paving the way for robotics development to accelerate at a rapid pace now that the software required to build the brain is starting to catch 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 represent a huge opportunity.

But this opportunity also extends to startups. Prominently featured at German car company Schaeffler’s CES 2026 booth was the year-and-a-half-old British Humanoid, demonstrating the capabilities of the HMND 01 robot.

The wheeled robot was built in just seven months, Humanoid CEO Artem Sokolov tells me as we watch him sort through car parts with his pincer-like hands. “We built our bipedal aircraft for service and home much faster – in five months,” Sokolov added.

Sokolov said the robot’s speed can be explained by the boom in artificial intelligence as well as the influx of talent being recruited from major robotics companies. He said the company has already signed about 25,000 pre-orders for HMND 01 and has completed beta trials with six Fortune 500 companies.

This momentum extends to the next generation of Humanoid robots, where Sokolov doesn’t anticipate any real bottlenecks. The key factors setting the pace will be improvements in AI models and making devices more reliable and cost-effective.

Human noise is reaching its peak

Humanoid may have the rights to the name, but the concept of Humanoids is a broader scope.

By the end of last year, the commercialization of humanoid robots had entered an “explosive phase of growth,” with a 508% year-over-year increase in global market revenues to reach $440 million, according to Report issued By IDC this month.

At CES, Qualcomm showed a demo of the robot How to update her platform It can be adapted across different forms, including a robotic arm that can assemble a sandwich. But it was the humanoid robots at her booth that got everyone to pull out their phones and start filming.

“Our vision is that if you have any embodiment, any mechatronic system, our platform should be able to turn it into an intelligent robot that is constantly learning,” Qualcomm’s Sadiq said. But he added that the main benefit of the human form is its “flexibility.”

Some in the robotics world have criticized the focus on robots for replicating our limitations. It’s an idea with which Libaridian disagrees, pointing out that we designed our world around us and that robots should be able to operate within it.

“There are many boring, dangerous, dirty tasks — they call them the three tasks — that humans do today, that we are understaffed at, and that this technology could potentially help us with,” he said.

Libaridian added that we already have many specialized robots working in factories around the world. With their combination of arms, legs, and mobility, humanoid robots are “pretty much a superset of all other types of robots,” and as such, they’re ideal for general-purpose work we need help with.

The hype around robots — and humans in particular — at CES this year was intense. Even Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter admitted as much in a Q&A with reporters moments after the new Atlas was unveiled on stage.

But it’s not just hype, Playter insisted, because Boston Dynamics has already proven it can bring thousands of robots to market. “This is not an indicator of a hype cycle, but actually an indicator of an emerging industry,” he said.

A huge amount of money is being pumped into a rapidly growing number of robotics startups. The rate of this investment is an indication that the technology is ready to take off, according to Nvidia’s Lebaredian.

“It’s mainly because experts, people who understand these things, now believe, technically, that all of this is possible,” he said. “We have gone from a problem of scientific discovery to an engineering problem.”

Robot evolution: from industry to home

From what I observed at the show, this engineering “problem” is one that many companies have already solved. Robots like Atlas and HMND 01 have crossed the threshold from prototype to factory readiness. The question for many of us will be When will these robots be ready for our homes?.

Playter has spoken publicly about Boston Dynamics’ ambitions in this regard. He believes that Atlas is developing into a home robot, but not yet. Some new entrants to the robotics market – 1X, Sunday Robotics and Humanoid among them – are keen to get their robots into people’s homes in the next couple of years. The player is warned against this approach.

“Companies are announcing that they want to go straight home,” he said. “We think this is the wrong strategy.”

The reasons he cited are two-fold: pricing and safety. Blatter echoed a sentiment I’ve heard elsewhere: that the first real use for humanoid home robots would be to carry out care duties for the disabled and elderly. Maybe within 20 years, you’ll have a robot that carries you in and out of bed, but relying on one to do that when you’re in a vulnerable state poses a “critical security issue,” he added.

Putting robots in factories first allows people to work closely with them while maintaining a safe distance, allowing safety kinks to be ironed out. Widespread deployment of robots in industrial settings will also lead to mass manufacturing of components that will, at some point, make robots affordable for the rest of us (unlike 1X’s $20,000 Neo robot, for example), Playter said.

However, he envisions the business model will be “robots as a service,” even when they first enter our homes. Elder care itself is a big industry with real money being spent which could present Boston Dynamics with a market opportunity as Atlas takes its first steps off the factory floor.

“I’ve spent a lot of money… with my mother in specialized care the last few years,” he said. “With robots that can maintain independence and dignity at home, I think people will actually spend money — maybe $20,000 a year.”

The first “care” robots will likely be companion robots. This year at CES, Tombot announced its robotic Labrador, Jenny, who… I was first charmed by the show in 2020Finally ready for sale. It was another sign to me that robots are ready to live a life outside the walls of the convention center.

Unlike previous years, I left Vegas confident that I would see more of this year’s CES robot lineup in the future. I may not have reached home yet, but it’s time to prepare for a world where robots will increasingly walk among us.