It might be a little early to declare 2026 the year that robots went mainstream but at CES in Las Vegas this week, we’re starting to see signs that the biggest companies in tech are taking robotics more seriously than ever before.
Qualcomm kicked off its CES show on Monday morning by announcing a full suite of robotics technologies, designed to power everything from small household robots to full-sized humanoids. It’s calling this full-stack architecture, which integrates hardware, software and AI, the Dragonwing IQ10 Series.
To demonstrate what this tech is capable of, Qualcomm has partnered with Vietnamese robotics company Vinmotion on the Motion 2 robot — a general-purpose humanoid. In a video posted to YouTube last week, Vinmotion gave a hint of what the robot was capable of. It showed the Motion 2 punching through a piece of wood, crouching down to pick up a small teddy bear off the floor and bending its back in a way that most people older than 30 could only dream of doing.
Qualcomm also says it’s already partnered with other companies, including Figure, which makes humanoids it calls the “future of home help,” Advantech, APLUX, Autocore, Booster Robotics, Kuka Robotics and Robotech.ai.
It’s not surprising to see companies like Qualcomm, which have heavily invested in building the underlying tech to power the AI revolution across a range of devices from phones to cars, expand into robotics. Building on the strength of large language models that have been developed over the past few years, we’re starting to see similar progress in vision language action models. VLAs will be crucial for embodied AI, such as robots, to autonomously understand and move around the spaces they find themselves in, and present a fresh opportunity for chip companies wanting to expand their AI offerings.
“Whether from enterprise to consumer, I think the type of silicon that we develop for phones and for the edge is the perfect silicon for robots,” he said.
In November at Web Summit in Lisbon, I had the chance to ask Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon about how the company was thinking about robotics. He described it as “an incredible opportunity for us.” Qualcomm is interested in enterprise-focused robots for industry and consumer robots, but Amon envisions the former arriving sooner.
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Qualcomm’s years of investment in making chips and solutions for the auto sector has put it in an ideal position to move into robotics, he added. In the same way you can’t put a server inside a car, you also can’t put a server inside a robot. You also need to make sure whatever solution you’re using doesn’t suck up too much power, taking away from the range of the vehicle or the robot.
The Dragonwing IQ10 is designed to provide energy-efficient “brain of the robot” capabilities, says Qualcomm. It will give robots advanced perception, better motion planning, and manipulation and human-robot interaction skills.
The company will use the expertise it has gained while developing advanced driver assistance systems for cars to ensure that the robots are safe, said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s EVP for automotive and robotics. “By building on our strong foundational technologies and expanding portfolio of developer tools, we’re redefining what’s possible with physical AI by moving intelligent machines out of the labs and into real-world environments,” he said.
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