Renting Robots Is Harder Than It Looks
A RoboBusiness panel in October will press the leaders of three robotics companies on the real costs of selling robots as a service, not a one-time purchase.
Key points
- RaaS, or robots as a service, is a business model where companies pay a recurring fee to use robots rather than buying them outright.
- A panel at RoboBusiness 2026 on October 20 in Santa Clara will feature executives from Locus Robotics, Roboworx, and Aescape discussing how to make RaaS work in practice.
- The session runs from 3:30 to 4:15 p.m. PT in Room 207 of the Santa Clara Convention Center.
- RaaS demands far more than a subscription price: contracts, uptime guarantees, maintenance programmes, and ongoing customer support all have to be designed from scratch.
Renting a robot sounds simple. Pay a monthly fee, skip the six-figure purchase order. The people who actually run RaaS businesses say the model is nothing like that first impression.
RaaS, short for robots as a service, works roughly the way cloud software does: instead of buying hardware outright (a capital expense, meaning a large one-time cost), a customer pays an ongoing fee. That shifts risk and responsibility onto the provider, who now has to guarantee the robot keeps working long after delivery.
That operational weight is what a panel at RoboBusiness 2026 plans to dig into. The session, titled "The RaaS Playbook: Pricing, Service, and Scale," is scheduled for October 20 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, as first reported by The Robot Report.
Who is on the panel?
Three practitioners will share the stage. Rick Faulk is CEO of Locus Robotics, a warehouse automation company. Locus will be familiar to readers who followed our coverage on 28 August of its acquisition of a Canadian gripping startup. Bill Booth handles technology sales and business development at Roboworx. Eric Linde is chief product officer at Aescape, which makes AI-driven massage robots. Mike Oitzman, senior editor at The Robot Report, will moderate.
Each panellist runs or advises a company that has had to work out, from scratch, how to price a service rather than a product.
What will they actually cover?
The conversation is meant to move past the appeal of predictable revenue and into operational detail. That includes how to write contracts that protect both sides, what a service-level agreement (a formal promise about uptime and response times) should contain, how to measure whether a customer is actually getting value, and how to manage maintenance for fleets spread across multiple sites.
This session runs on the same day as a separate RoboBusiness talk we covered on 9 September: AGIBOT's head of North America walking through the real business case for humanoid robots on the factory floor. Together, they suggest RoboBusiness 2026 is leaning hard into the economics of deployment, not just the technology.
The honest message from the panellists' backgrounds is that recurring revenue only works if the robot keeps working. Designing the service wrapper around the hardware from day one, not as an afterthought, is what separates companies that scale from ones that churn through customers. Investors get a clearer test for telling a durable business from a polished pitch deck.
Common questions
What is the difference between RaaS and just leasing a robot?
A lease is a financing arrangement: you take on the asset and its maintenance. RaaS typically means the provider stays responsible for keeping the robot operational, covering repairs, software updates and performance guarantees. It's closer to hiring a service than renting a machine.
Who should care about this panel?
Anyone building, funding, or evaluating commercial robots. That includes startup founders stress-testing their unit economics (whether each robot earns more than it costs), operations managers weighing automation options, and investors trying to spot which RaaS companies have real staying power.
