Why Robotics Is Moving From Contained Automation To Open Deployment
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InnovationWhy Robotics Is Moving From Contained Automation To Open DeploymentByJohn Wall,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 28, 2026, 12:00pm EDTJohn Wall, President at QNX, a division of BlackBerry. gettyFor decades, robots operated behind fences in controlled environments, physically separated from people and optimized for predictability. Safety was achieved through isolation: Defined zones, fixed layouts and simple overrides stopped motion whenever uncertainty appeared. That model worked because human interaction was the exception, not the rule.Today, that assumption is fading fast.As robots step into shared human environments—think sidewalks, hospital corridors, retail spaces, construction sites and more—the safety stakes rise and the margin for error narrows. Conditions change constantly in ways no set of rules can fully anticipate. Industry research from QNX’s Inside the Robot: Architecture Benchmark Report highlights a growing gap between ambition and readiness, with only a quarter of robotics developers confident their current architectures can scale significantly to meet future demands. Robots are arriving in shared spaces faster than the architectures that support them can hold up.Many organizations still approach robotics with a legacy mindset, assuming that precision engineering and predefined behaviors are enough to ensure reliability. The defining challenge facing the industry is no longer what robots can do, but whether their underlying architectures are designed to manage this uncertainty continuously without defaulting to constant stops that undermine trust.Scaling On The Wrong FoundationDeployment is accelerating, but many robotic systems are scaling on software architectures seldom designed for continuous uncertainty. When perception workloads spike, sensors degrade or timing becom...
