Trend Trend 14: orchestration rather than individual capability becomes the robotics frontier

Summary

The fourteenth trend in CB Insights' outlook is that robots are learning to work together. The firm argues that the next frontier in robotics is orchestration, meaning the coordination of many machines, rather than the abilities of any single robot. In warehouses, the technology stack is maturing toward layers that manage robots, tasks and traffic across sites. Amazon reports that a learned fleet model improved robot travel efficiency by 10 percent. Funding for robot foundation model developers has surged, and coordination tools are expected to spread into factories and defence. Because coordination needs low latency, computing is also moving closer to the robots themselves.