RobOpsCon 26

RobOpsCon 2026

The premier conference on scaling robot operations.

A day of keynotes, panels, lightning talks, and a hands-on workshop on the hardest problems in physical AI operations.

Now in its third edition, RobOpsCon brings together practitioners to share the lessons learned and network with top industry operators.

Program Themes

Orchestrating Heterogeneous Fleets

Coordinating AMRs, humanoids, cobots, and fixed automation in the same space or across the world. Real-time spatial conflict resolution, task allocation across robots with different capabilities and APIs, and fleet behavior during partial failures in mixed-vendor environments.

Scaling Data Pipelines for Physical AI

Large deployments are becoming the most productive data-generation infrastructure available. Capturing, labeling, and routing high-fidelity telemetry at fleet scale to feed embodied model training and close the sim-to-real gap.

Decentralized Intelligence for Large Fleets

The shift from centralized, deterministic control to on-robot decision-making. Coordination protocols without a single point of failure, safety guarantees, and observability when intelligence is distributed across hundreds of nodes.

Agenda

9:00 Welcome & opening Florian Pestoni & Joe Wieciek

9:15 Agentic Software for Robot Operations Anthony Jules with Florian Pestoni

10:00 Decentralized Intelligence at Fleet Scale Saurabh Chandra, Jeff Mahler, Moderator: Joe Wieciek

10:45 Break

11:00 From Lab to Sidewalk Touraj Parang

11:45 Lunch

1:00 Investing in Physical AI Betsy Mulé, Oliver Mitchell, Tiq Chapa, Moderator: Florian Pestoni

1:45. What Breaks When Fleets Scale Aaron Nathan with Joe Wieciek

2:30 Break

3:00 Orchestrating Heterogeneous Fleets Andreas Bihlmaier, Arshan Poursohi, Rishabh Aggarwal, Cristian Ionescu-Catrina, Moderator: Florian Pestoni

3:45 OpenRobOps Hernan Badenes, Mark Landergan, Vishaal Nagaraja, Florian Pestoni

4:15 InOrbit Robot Space demos

4:45 Closing remarks Joe Wieciek & Florian Pestoni

5:00 Networking reception

Speaker Lineup

Rishabh Aggarwal

CTO, Raise Robotics

Rishabh Aggarwal is CTO of Raise Robotics, which builds multi-purpose autonomous robots for dangerous work in heavy industries like construction, manufacturing and shipbuilding. Before Raise he was a founding engineer at Tortuga AgTech, where he scaled autonomous harvesting from a single prototype to 150 robots, among the largest commercial fleets of its kind. His work has been recognized in TIME's Best Inventions.

Andreas Bihlmaier

Director of Delivery, Intrinsic

Andreas Bihlmaier is the Director of Delivery at Intrinsic, an AI robotics group at Google, where he scales advanced AI robotics from the lab to real-world deployment. He is the former Chief Software Architect at ABB Robotics and the founder of robodev. He was recognized by MIT Technology Review as "Innovator Under 35." He holds a PhD in Robotics from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Saurabh Chandra

Founder & CEO, Ati Robotics

Saurabh Chandra is founder and CEO of Ati Robotics, which builds full-stack autonomous industrial vehicles for factories and warehouses. Ati's Sherpa robots run in demanding real-world environments across sites worldwide, on the way to a million autonomous missions a year. He works on the hard operational problems of deploying and scaling robot fleets in production.

Cristian Ionescu-Catrina

Ecosystem and Partnerships, Bosch

Cristian Ionescu-Catrina is a technology leader focused on Robotics, sensing and ecosystem development. With 25+ years in the semiconductors industry, he works across technology partners, ecosystem and system integrators to advance sensing solutions and their integration into safer robotics systems. Cristian is actively involved in robotics safety standards as a member of U.S. TAG to ISO/TC299 robotics standards

Anthony Jules

Co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer, Robust.AI

Anthony Jules is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Robust.AI, where he pioneers collaborative mobility in robotics. A 30-year technology veteran, Anthony brings deep expertise in robotics, AI, and machine learning, grounded in his belief that complex problems require human-centered, multidisciplinary solutions. He previously led product teams at Google Robotics and X, including on the Everyday Robot project, having joined through its acquisition of Redwood Robotics.

Jeff Mahler

Co-founder & CTO, Ambi Robotics

Jeff Mahler is co-founder and CTO of Ambi Robotics, which builds AI-powered robots for parcel sortation along with AmbiOS, an operating system for robotic sortation. His work grew out of the Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) at UC Berkeley, where he earned his PhD with Ken Goldberg on teaching robots to grasp items they have never seen before. He leads the technology behind Ambi's sortation fleets deployed across logistics and e-commerce operations.

Oliver Mitchell

Partner, ff Venture Capital

Oliver Mitchell is a venture investor, operator, and advisor with nearly 20 years of experience investing in robotics, Physical AI, and emerging technologies. He is a Partner at Arkenstone Venture Partners and ff Venture Capital, focused on early-stage deep tech startups. Over his investment career, Oliver has led investments and diligence across numerous companies, with 10 liquidity events, including four IPOs and a $1.4 billion private equity exit. He is also active at the board and advisory level with companies including CivRobotics, Cambrian Robotics, Plus One Robotics, Burro, Haply, Persona AI, and Viam, where he is building a robotics startup incubator. Oliver is an Adjunct Professor at Sy Syms School of Business and the author of A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI.

Betsy Mulé

Principal, F-Prime

Betsy Mulé is a Principal at F-Prime, where she focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise technology and robotics. Prior to joining F-Prime, she was a strategy consultant at Mars & Co., where she advised Fortune 500 companies across the US, LatAm and Europe. Betsy is a graduate of MIT, where she majored in Chemical-Biological Engineering.

Aaron Nathan

Founder & CEO, Point One Navigation

Aaron Nathan, CEO and Founder of Point One Navigation, is an entrepreneur and technical leader with over a decade of experience in cutting-edge robotics and critical software/hardware development. He has led multi-disciplinary teams building complex systems in financial, defense, and enterprise markets and has founded two venture-backed startups. He has deep domain experience in sensor fusion, computer vision, navigation, and embedded systems, specifically in the context of self-driving vehicles and other robotic applications.

Touraj Parang

President & COO, Serve Robotics

Touraj Parang is President & COO of Serve Robotics, a leading autonomous sidewalk delivery company. He helped spin the company out of Uber and take it public on Nasdaq. He is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, and author working at the forefront of physical AI and autonomous robotics. Touraj brings a rare operator's perspective on what it takes to move breakthrough technology from the lab into the real world—and how robotics will reshape commerce, cities, work, and everyday life.

Florian Pestoni

Co-founder, ROG; Founder & CEO, InOrbit (Moderator)

Florian Pestoni is founder and CEO of InOrbit.AI, the management layer for Physical AI, and co-founder of the Robot Operations Group. He helped define RobOps as a discipline and pushes for open, interoperable operations, contributing to the ISO 21423 standard and releasing OpenRobOps, the open-source robot operations software. He speaks and writes frequently on scaling robot operations.

Arshan Poursohi

Co-Founder & CEO, Third Wave Automation

Arshan Poursohi is co-founder and CEO of Third Wave Automation, which builds autonomous forklifts for warehouses using a shared-autonomy approach that pairs on-vehicle AI with remote human support. Before Third Wave he was Director of Engineering at Toyota Research Institute and led robotics work at Google, with earlier work on wireless sensor networks at Sun Microsystems. He founded Third Wave in 2018 to bring material-handling automation into real-world logistics operations.

Joe Wieciek

Co-founder, ROG; Agtonomy (Moderator)

Joe Wieciek is co-founder of the Robot Operations Group and a robotics operations leader who has spent his career turning prototypes into production fleets, setting up the systems to scale deployments to over 50,000 robots. He currently works on autonomy for agriculture at Agtonomy. At ROG he helps build the practitioner community defining how robots are operated at scale.