Robotics, Automation and the Future of Industrial Operations: Highlights from CARNET Ecosystem Day 2026

Barcelona, May 27th 2026

CARNET, the open innovation hub initiated by Volkswagen Group Innovation, SEAT S.A. and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC), hosted the fourth edition of its annual CARNET Ecosystem Day on 27 May 2026 at CASA CUPRA Raval in Barcelona. This flagship event has established itself as a key gathering point for CARNET’s innovation community, bringing together entrepreneurs, industrial partners, researchers, investors and ecosystem stakeholders to explore new frontiers in automotive and mobility innovation.

Each edition of CARNET Ecosystem Day focuses on a different strategic theme, selected by Volkswagen Group Innovation to reflect the priorities shaping the automotive industry. This year’s edition turned the spotlight on the convergence of robotics, artificial intelligence and industrial automation, exploring how these technologies are reshaping the future of manufacturing, logistics and industrial operations. The 2026 programme centred on four main themes:

-Intelligent Robotics & Collaborative Automation

-AI-Driven Smart Manufacturing & Digital Twins

-Future Logistics and Supply Chain Automation

-Adaptive AI in Industrial Operations

The event brought together CARNET’s founding members alongside a carefully selected cohort of 12 European start-ups, chosen through CARNET’s structured scouting process across Southern Europe, alongside a broad audience of industrial players, research centres, investors, accelerators and ecosystem partners.

Setting the Direction: VW Group Innovation’s Robotics Roadmap

The day’s programme opened with a keynote presentation by Dr. Daniel Schütz, representing Volkswagen Group Innovation, who laid out the strategic context for the technologies on show. Framing the session around a roadmap titled “From Rule-Based Automation to AI-Driven Autonomy”, Dr. Schütz described a three-horizon vision for the evolution of robotics across the Group’s operations:

“Today, we want to increase the level of automation through the integration of service robotics. Tomorrow, we want to increase the level of resilience through the use of AI-driven robotics. In the future, we want to increase the level of flexibility through the orchestration of collaborative robotic fleets. Robotics is moving from a rule-based robotics to an autonomous, cognitive, intelligent robotics; and to enable us to get more resilience, automation and flexibility, we cannot achieve this alone. That is why the event today is very important, as we need collaboration with start-ups to make this roadmap happen.”

— Dr. Daniel Schütz, Volkswagen Group Innovation

The roadmap served as a powerful frame for everything that followed – each of the 12 start-ups on show representing, in their own way, a potential building block of the future Dr. Schütz described.

A Morning of Innovation at CASA CUPRA Raval

Following the keynote, the programme’s centrepiece was a pitching session in which eight start-ups each presented their solutions in a focused five-minute pitch followed by open Q&A. A further four companies participated in a dedicated showroom session, offering live demonstrations and hands-on interactions with their technologies.

The eight start-ups selected for the pitching session represented some of the most compelling emerging technologies at the intersection of robotics, AI and industrial operations:

• AICA (Switzerland) develops a real-time, hardware-agnostic robotics software platform that enables industrial robots to adapt to variability, contact-rich tasks and imperfect positioning, combining sensing, force control and AI-driven behaviours in a low-code environment.

• Algorized (Switzerland) is building a physical AI nervous system for machines: a sensing layer that fuses radar and camera data for reliable human detection, localisation and tracking in real-world environments, enabling safe human-robot interaction for mobile robots and humanoids.

• ex9 (France) automates industrial yard operations with driverless electric yard trucks featuring proprietary algorithms for centimetre-level reverse docking and autonomous trailer coupling, addressing the structural labour shortage and safety risks of manual shunting.

• Gobano Robotics (France) builds state-of-the-art AI robotics for dexterous industrial tasks, using imitation and reinforcement learning to automate the complex, labour-intensive workflows that traditional automation cannot handle, with systems that learn and improve continuously on the production floor.

• Hipert (Italy) provides a high-performance software framework for autonomous systems, solving the computational bottleneck that prevents complex AI and control algorithms from running on low-power embedded hardware. Their technology has been validated in autonomous racing, where their system achieved a lap time faster than any human driver at the Marzaglia circuit in 2025.

• MotorSkins (Germany) develops soft-robotic textiles that move, sense and respond, combining fluid-driven systems, smart textiles and advanced knitting engineering to create seamless interactive surfaces for next-generation automotive interiors, enabling haptic feedback, adaptive comfort and embedded sensing without rigid mechanics.

• QuantumMads (Spain) builds optimisation, forecasting and simulation solutions for industrial operations using AI and quantum computing, with live deployments already running at Telefónica, Arania and Canal Isabel II.

• Synthara (Switzerland) is a semiconductor IP company developing ComputeRAM, a compute-in-memory technology that performs AI computation directly inside memory, delivering up to 98% lower energy consumption and 99% lower latency for edge AI applications. The solution is automotive-ready, enabling efficient processing across camera, radar and lidar pipelines for SDVs from ADAS to L3 automation.

These solutions underscored a defining trend in the sector: the shift from rigid, scripted automation towards adaptive, learning-capable systems that can operate reliably in the complexity and variability of real industrial environments.

Showroom: Technology You Could Touch

Four additional start-ups joined the showroom session, where live demonstrations brought the technologies to life in direct conversation with attendees:

• A4Radar (Spain) demonstrated advanced radar sensing for automotive and industrial applications, including a live demo of contactless child presence detection and vital signs monitoring using UWB and mmWave SoC technology combined with real-time AI.

• Healthy Suits (Spain), the benchmark company in the Spanish market for exoskeleton solutions, showed how their Muscle Suit range reduces musculoskeletal strain for workers in logistics, industrial assembly, maintenance and manufacturing — allowing visitors to try the technology firsthand.

• R3 Robotics (Luxembourg) presented their automated robotic platform for disassembling end-of-life EV battery packs and eDrives, combining computer vision, adaptive tooling and process data to enable safe, scalable battery recycling and reuse across the circular EV value chain.

• TETMET (France) showcased their automated robotic production of stainless steel lattices, a manufacturing approach that significantly reduces structural part mass while eliminating toolings and molds, with applications across automotive, defence and aerospace.

Voices from the Ecosystem

The event generated warm reactions from participants. Víctor José Pelegrín Martín, Co-founder of A4Radar, shared his impressions: “Without a doubt, the highlight of the event was being able to demonstrate it live. Not a presentation. Not a promise. A real-life demo of our radar technology applied to Child Presence Detection.” He highlighted the business development value of these direct interactions: “These opportunities are incredibly valuable because they allow us to do something that is often lost amidst all the slides: talk, test, demonstrate, receive feedback and connect with people who understand the challenge.”

Another positive reaction came from Jordi Casas Juan, Mobility Expert at RACC, who reflected on the broader significance of the event: “The transformation of mobility increasingly depends on the ability to connect talent, technology and innovation. And this is precisely what CARNET Ecosystem Days represent.”

Building Bridges Across the Ecosystem

Beyond the pitches and demonstrations, CARNET Ecosystem Day 2026 served as a platform for dialogue and meaningful conversations that are difficult to replicate in any other format – connecting start-ups with potential industrial partners, investors with emerging technologies, and researchers with the applied challenges that the automotive and mobility sectors are actively working to solve.

“The strength of our ecosystem lies in the diversity of the partners we bring together,” said Cristina Juárez, CIO at CARNET. CARNET Ecosystem Day continues to grow as a reference event for innovation-driven collaboration in Southern Europe. The technologies present this year, – from adaptive robotics to in-memory AI chips to soft-robotic automotive interiors, – point towards a future where the boundaries between software, hardware and physical operations continue to blur.

As CARNET continues its long-term scouting and innovation mission, events like the Ecosystem Day remain central to its commitment to building the collaborative networks that drive research, experimentation and the real-world implementation of transformative mobility solutions.