"Now More Than Ever"

When I sat down with Joyce Sidopoulos and Marita McGinn of MassRobotics, the phrase that kept surfacing was "now more than ever." A year on, it reads less like a turn of phrase and more like a forecast. Almost everything the three of them flagged that day has since hardened into a 2026 storyline: a labor-driven push into automation, a funding gauntlet that nearly broke a critical federal program, and the first real attempts to write rules for robots that share space with the public.

Here's the conversation, brought forward to where the industry actually stands now.

The case for automation was never about replacing people

The oldest, most exhausting question in robotics is the one about jobs. The MassRobotics view is that robots create higher-value work rather than erasing it, and that the real bottleneck is retraining people for those roles. Joyce's example was the window washers she and Marita watched dangling off a skyscraper, a job a robot should arguably do, except automating it still requires someone to deploy, maintain, repair, and build the system. The labor doesn't vanish. It moves up the value chain and out of harm's way.

The 2026 data backs the instinct. The U.S. continues to invest in robotics specifically to address labor shortages, and analysts now talk about coexistence rather than replacement, hybrid operations where mobile robots and fixed automation each handle what they do best. Gartner's projection that half of new warehouses in developed markets will be "human-optional" by 2030 still leaves people in the building; the scarce skill of the moment, they stress, is change management, not robotics engineering.

Marita's proof point was small but concrete: across 20 startups in two accelerator cohorts — companies still early in their lives — founders had already hired roughly 120 people. The robots came with payroll attached.

"Buy it, don't build it", and the 80% problem

Another point Marita said was aimed at large companies: when an executive announces, "We're going to do robotics," the honest response is to add time to the timeline. You can reinvent the wheel internally, or you can buy it, iterate, and support a company already doing the work. MassRobotics is firmly in the buy-it camp.

That advice matters more in 2026 because of a number Marita kept returning to: roughly 80% of U.S. warehouses still have no automation at all. The sales person in me bemas knowing that that's not a saturated market, it's a vast greenfield, and it's being developed in a way that validates the buy-it thesis. Robotics-as-a-Service has become a practical way for smaller manufacturers and logistics firms to deploy and validate systems without the risk of ownership, and adoption is accelerating fastest among exactly those smaller players.

There's a cautionary note, too. Industry watchers expect 2026 to bring a "reckoning" the first major mergers, failures, and clear signals about which vendors last. Demand isn't the question anymore; reliability is. The startups that survive will largely be the ones doing what MassRobotics pushes its residents to do: get real customers, prove the thing works in the wild, and resist over-engineering.

The funding gauntlet got real

If one thread played out almost literally, it's non-dilutive funding. Marita described supporting reform of SBIR — federal grants that let companies build dual-use technology without giving up equity — and both she and Joyce argued that for robotics companies, where raising money is brutal, the government can act like the largest seed investor in the country.

Then the program nearly disappeared. SBIR and its sister program STTR, together more than $4 billion a year, lapsed on September 30, 2025 when Congress failed to reauthorize them. What followed was the longest disruption in the programs' four-decade history: solicitations stopped, review panels were suspended, and roughly 6,000 small businesses were left without a path forward.

The resolution came in early 2026. A compromise brokered by Senators Joni Ernst and Ed Markey cleared the Senate on March 3, passed the House 345–41 on March 17, and was signed into law in April, reauthorizing both programs through 2031, adding a strategic breakthrough award with a ceiling reported as high as $30 million. The money is back, with more at the top end. But the months of limbo showed exactly why an organization that watches policy on its startups' behalf is more valuable now than ever.

Writing the rules for robots in shared spaces

Now what about meeting robots in public places? Airports, hospitals, sidewalks - you name it. Joyce put it simply: we all understand a traffic light. What's the equivalent shared language for the moment a robot and a person meet in a hallway?

That question stopped being hypothetical. MassRobotics — with ASTM International, NIST, and the Urban Robotics Foundation — has since produced exactly this work, publishing an executive summary on public-facing robots in shared spaces. The consensus echoes Joyce almost word for word: the central risk is no longer whether robots show up in public, but whether governance evolves fast enough to earn public trust. As humanoid and mobile robots edge from factory floors into transit hubs, standards experts warn that decades-old industrial rules simply don't cover untrained bystanders. The traffic-light problem is now one of the defining safety questions of the field.

The quiet infrastructure underneath it all

MassRobotics describes itself as a bridge. It can speak startup and corporate, two groups forever misaligned on timelines and expectations. It protects founders' time, keeps pilots from dying in "pilot purgatory," and insists corporate partners offer something real rather than treating startups as an innovation-theater field trip.

That role doesn't show up in a market-size chart, but it may determine whether the projections come true. The $6.6-billion-by-2035 forecasts only materialize if the companies building the technology survive long enough to ship it, through funding lapses, reliability reckonings, and the slow work of writing safety standards from scratch.

A year ago, the three of us in a room in Boston named the forces that would shape the next phase of U.S. robotics. The forces showed up on schedule. What the conversation got most right wasn't any single prediction, it was the framing underneath all of them: this is the moment the U.S. needs robotics, and the companies doing the work need support, now more than ever.

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This piece draws on a conversation recorded for the ROS Goss podcast, hosted by Mandy Dwight, founder and CEO of Dwight & Company, featuring Joyce Sidopoulos and Marita McGinn of MassRobotics. View the full episode here.