Richtech brings an AI pallet jack to Automate

Richtech Robotics announced on June 16 that it will debut a new AI-driven Pallet Jack robot at Automate 2026, the North American robotics and automation show in Chicago. The demonstration is planned for booth 17060, with chief operating officer Phil Zheng scheduled to speak on June 24 at 12:30 p.m. CDT on the Humanoid Pavilion stage. The verified point is narrow but useful: Richtech is presenting an autonomous material-handling robot meant to fit into existing warehouse workflows, not only a humanoid stage demo.

The pallet jack choice matters. In warehouses, many practical gains come from unglamorous work: moving loads, feeding a line, reducing dead time between receiving, storage, packing and shipping. Richtech says the Pallet Jack robot is designed to transport heavy payloads with precision and to integrate into current operations. That makes it different from a purely humanoid robotics story. It starts with a familiar tool for operators and tries to make that tool more autonomous, rather than asking a facility to rebuild itself around a new robot shape.

The announcement also places the robot inside a broader portfolio. Richtech plans to show the Titan 440 and Titan 660, heavy-duty autonomous mobile robots for warehouse and logistics environments. An autonomous mobile robot, or AMR, moves through a site without a fixed guide such as a rail, using sensors, mapping and navigation software. The company will also feature DEX, its humanoid-form robot for packaging workflows, as a bridge between heavy transport and more specialized manipulation. The commercial claims still need production evidence, but the architecture is clear: Richtech wants to treat material handling as a coordinated system rather than a set of isolated machines.

Caution is still warranted because the source is a trade-show announcement. It does not provide pricing, measured cycle times, availability rates or a firm commercial rollout date for the Pallet Jack robot. What it does show is where part of industrial robotics is moving: toward less theatrical machines that address labor availability, payload movement and repeatability. For manufacturers and logistics operators, the useful signal at Automate will not be whether a humanoid appears on stage. It will be whether Richtech can make autonomous pallet jacks, heavy AMRs and specialized manipulation work together without forcing a full redesign of the warehouse.