Intrinsic, Google LLC’s artificial intelligence robot software company, unveiled today during Automate 2026 an AI robotic prototype that will help companies modularize factory floors with automated robotics.

Automate is North America’s largest robotics and automation trade show, hosted by the Association for Advancing Automation. It’s possibly the best place to showcase something like what Intrinsic is bringing to the showroom floor today, since it’s the main stage for industrial automation announcements.

Founded in 2021, Google incorporated Intrinsic into its core operations in February to accelerate the development of physical AI to push the envelope of AI beyond digital applications into real-world industrial environments. Physical AI is when artificial intelligence systems use sensors, actuators, and control systems to perceive, reason, act and learn in real-world environments. It differs from pure software because it bridges the gap between bits and atoms – allowing autonomous machines such as robots, self-driving cars, drones and smart infrastructure to take action.

Intrisic is providing a reference design for an “intelligence cell,” a modular robot “workcell” built for AI. The reference will provide companies with everything needed to integrate AI-based robotic capabilities directly into automation products using the firm’s IntrinsicOS, enabling skilled assembly and supporting diverse hardware sets, software and features.

The company said it is a software-first, modular approach designed to make it highly accessible to machine, industrial, manufacturing and factory shops of all sizes.

For example, the company is working with CNC system integrators, which refers to automated control of machining tools like mills, lathes, routers and lasers using pre-programmed computer software replacing manual hand wheels and levers – often controlled by robot limbs and armatures.

These integrators include Trinity Automation and MartinSystems. With IntrinsicOS, they will be able to build in AI skills and systems that can manage systems without the need to program robots. Intrinsic allows high-level abstraction for perception, automated robot motion planning and the ability to grasp and insert parts.

The core platform also includes a web-based development environment and simulation engine called Flowstate that lets developers build robotics apps using modular “skills.” These are reusable building blocks for robotics behaviors that can be manually developed or hooked into AI-enabled workflows.

The vision of the platform is to reduce traditional complex robotics programming for on-floor expertise, which operationally requires hundreds of hours of coding labor and hardware knowledge, to “a few clicks” in a drag-and-drop interface. This allows systems integrators and automation engineers to marshal fewer resources and go directly from simulation to factory floor production in fewer hours.

Intrinsic notably announced a partnership with Foxconn in 2025, commenting at the time that the company intended to explore possibilities for mass deployment of robots on assembly lines to reshape the future of mass production.

On the showroom floor at Automate, Instrinsic said it is displaying a custom version of its workcell using a FANUC Corp. robot to demonstrate electronics assembly tasks. The company touted its continuing collaboration with FANUC to display the importance of hardware interoperability.

Photo: Intrinsic