Women In Tech: Top 10 Women In Robotics In 2026

The global robotics market is approaching $88 billion in 2026, on track to more than double by the early 2030s, with annual industrial installations projected to clear 700,000 units by 2028. While the Asia-Pacific region drives the largest portion of this surge, fast-moving robotics ecosystems are expanding across Europe, North America and South America.

Yet gender disparities persist across the sector, with women comprising under 30% of the global STEM workforce and less than 35% of manufacturing roles. The leaders highlighted below are actively shaping this expansion, advancing tactile sensing, embodied AI, swarm robotics, perception research and industrial automation across five continents.

The Blind Spots In Tech Media

Flashy walking robots and automated factory floors drive the majority of media coverage. Fundamental layers such as touch perception, swarm management and advanced vision processing are harder to turn into viral stories, yet they address the actual bottlenecks between a controlled prototype and a dependable field deployment. A machine might spot a target instantly, but without tactile awareness it cannot manipulate real-world objects safely.

Geographic preference widens the divide further. Advanced robotics research coming out of South Korea, Brazil and regional Europe rarely matches the publicity generated in Silicon Valley or traditional Japanese industrial centers. This selection deliberately weights toward that larger, underreported picture.

The Top Women In Robotics In 2026

The following profiles a select group of robotics founders and researchers to watch in 2026, spanning tactile sensing, embodied AI, industrial automation, swarm robotics and perception research across Australia, Europe, Asia, North America and South America.

1. Heba Khamis, CEO and Co-founder, Contactile

Khamis holds a PhD in tactile sensing and co-founded Contactile in June 2019, an Australian company developing sensors that give robots a human-like sense of touch. Its GAL2 Smart Tactile-Native Gripper is designed to let robots handle delicate or deformable materials with far more precision than vision-based systems alone can provide, and its 3D Force Button Sensors have been durability-tested past 20 million compression cycles. Contactile won ARM Hub PropelAir 2.0 in 2026, earning a residency at MassRobotics in Boston.

Touch has historically been the weakest sense in robotics, with most systems relying almost entirely on cameras or motor current spikes as an indirect proxy for contact. Contactile closes that gap directly by measuring friction and force at the point of contact, giving robots the kind of tactile feedback humans use constantly without thinking about it.

2. Nicole Robinson, CEO and Co-founder, Lyro Robotics

Food processing is a notoriously difficult environment for robotics, given the variability of the products involved and the hygiene standards required. LYRO’s deployment in that space, backed by Robinson’s own research background in computer vision and deep learning, is a genuine test of whether AI-driven robotics can handle the messy, inconsistent conditions that structured industrial settings usually avoid.

Food processing is a notoriously difficult environment for robotics, given the variability of the products involved and the hygiene standards required. Lyro’s deployment in that space is a genuine test of whether AI-driven robotics can handle the kind of messy, inconsistent conditions that structured industrial settings usually avoid.

3. Alona Kharchenko, Co-founder and CTO, Devanthro

Kharchenko co-founded and serves as CTO of Devanthro, a Munich-based company building Robodies, robotic avatars designed specifically for elderly care. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023, she has spent eight years building full-stack robotics aimed at real-world deployment, with partners including Charité Berlin, the University of Oxford and Diakonie. An early prototype is part of the permanent exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

Elderly care is one of the more socially significant and commercially underserved applications of robotics, requiring machines that can operate safely and usefully around vulnerable people rather than in controlled industrial settings. Devanthro is building directly for that need rather than a more generic domestic robotics use case.

4. Mar Masulli, CEO and Co-founder, BitMetrics

Masulli is a three-time founder and CEO of BitMetrics, a Barcelona-based company applying AI to improve vision and reasoning capabilities in robots and industrial machines. She also sits on the board of AER Automation and was named to both the 2025 Women in Robotics list and the IFR’s 2024 list of women shaping the future of robotics.

Vision alone doesn’t make a robot useful. The reasoning layer that turns visual input into a correct decision is where much of the real difficulty in industrial automation actually sits, and it’s the layer BitMetrics is built around.

5. Carla Gomez Cano, Co-founder and CEO, THEKER

Gomez Cano co-founded and leads THEKER, a Barcelona-built intelligent robotics and AI company designed, engineered and manufactured vertically. THEKER closed the largest Series A funding round of the year in Europe’s intelligent robotics sector, and its full-stack robotic systems are now deployed on factory floors for top-tier multinationals across fashion, logistics and food.

Building a robotics company vertically, controlling hardware, software and deployment rather than assembling from third-party components, is a harder path but gives THEKER direct control over solving the complex physical tasks its clients need handled, rather than adapting generic robotic arms to each new use case.

6. Younseal Eum, Founder, AeiROBOT

Eum began her career as a kinetic artist and exterior designer for robots before founding AeiROBOT, a spin-off from a robotics laboratory at Hanyang University launched in 2018. Her work centres on human-robot interaction, focusing on making robot movement feel natural and emotionally legible. AeiROBOT’s robots include ALICE, a human-proportioned humanoid that can play football and navigate grass, and AIMY, an autonomous indoor guide robot for customer service. She was named to the IFR’s 2026 “Women Shaping the Future of Robotics” list.

South Korea’s robotics sector is dominated by large industrial conglomerates, which makes independent founders working in the space comparatively rare. Eum’s design background gives AeiROBOT a distinctly different starting point from most competitors, building for how robots feel to interact with rather than starting purely from engineering specifications.

7. Asami Sasao, Senior Engineer, Kawasaki Heavy Industries

Sasao is a senior engineer in the Robot Business Division at Kawasaki Heavy Industries, one of Japan’s largest industrial robotics manufacturers, where she develops control software for industrial robots. She joined the company in 1991 during the early boom of industrial robot adoption in manufacturing and taught herself programming on the job to help power full factory production lines. She was named to the IFR’s 2026 “Women Shaping the Future of Robotics” list for her long-term technical contributions.

Japan has one of the deepest industrial robotics traditions in the world, and Sasao’s three-and-a-half decades inside one of its largest manufacturers represent the kind of sustained technical contribution that rarely gets external recognition until an initiative like the IFR list specifically seeks it out.

8. Sabine Hauert, Professor of Swarm Engineering, University of Bristol

Hauert OBE is Professor of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol, where her research spans nanorobots for cancer treatment to larger robots for environmental monitoring and logistics. Before Bristol, she engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL. She is also President and co-founder of Robohub.org and executive trustee of AIhub.org, two non-profits connecting the robotics and AI communities with the public, and her work has featured in the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and Nature.

Swarm robotics is one of the more research-heavy corners of the field, further from commercial deployment than industrial automation but with real long-term applications. Hauert’s work spans both the environmental and medical ends of that spectrum, and her decade of public science communication has helped translate that research for audiences well beyond academia.

9. Shuran Song, Assistant Professor, Stanford University

Song holds a PhD in Computer Science from Princeton and a Bachelor of Engineering from HKUST. She was a faculty member at Columbia University from 2019 to 2023 before joining Stanford, where she now leads the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab, building algorithms that help intelligent systems learn manipulation skills from human demonstrations, real-world data and open-source datasets. Her honours include the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and multiple best paper awards at RSS and CoRL.

Open datasets accelerate research across the entire field rather than benefiting a single lab or company. Song’s focus on accessibility, both in cost and in openness, reflects a different kind of contribution to robotics than commercial deployment, but one with wide-reaching effects on who gets to do robotics research at all.

10. Kelen Teixeira Vivaldini, Professor, UFSCar

Vivaldini holds a PhD in mechatronics from EESC/USP and completed a postdoc at ICM/USP and the University of Sydney. She has been a professor of autonomous robots at UFSCar since 2015 and is also a senior researcher with the Multi-Robot Systems Group at the Czech Technical University in Prague. Her research centres on using UAVs and standard sensors for monitoring and mapping, developing path-planning systems that maximise the area robots can cover while minimising uncertainty.

Environmental monitoring is an area where robotics has genuine practical value in regions facing significant ecological pressures, and Vivaldini’s research applies autonomous systems directly to those conditions rather than adapting technology built for entirely different environments. Her dual position spanning Brazil and the Czech Republic also reflects how specialised robotics research increasingly depends on international collaboration.