Trade Fair – the North Hall B of McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois USA, Booth 4639
What the event is
Automate is North America’s largest robotics and automation event, and it returns to McCormick Place in Chicago on June 22–25, 2026, with free registration for the show floor. It bills itself as the largest automation show in the Americas, where visitors learn directly from industry leaders and see the most innovative solutions under one roof. The show floor spans AI and robotics, motion control, vision systems and more, paired with an educational conference led by leading voices in automation.
It’s produced by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), and the 2026 edition leans hard into the topics our buyers are already asking about: a dedicated Humanoid Robot Forum and Pavilion, a Startup Challenge, keynotes from the likes of Siemens and Standard Bots, plus an Innovation Stage, AMR demos and a deep education track. The crowd is exactly ours — operations and plant leaders, engineering and automation managers, IT/OT, procurement, and the C-suite making CAPEX calls.
Why DBR77 is there
Automate is a hall full of hardware — robots, arms, AMRs, vision rigs. DBR77’s job is to be the company that answers the question every visitor on that floor is quietly carrying: “Great robot — but how do I decide what to automate, prove the ROI, source it, connect it, and actually run it?”
That’s the whole DBR77 thesis. We’re not selling another robot; we’re selling the operating layer around automation, that turns an automation ambition into a controlled, measurable first step instead of a multi-million, multi-month gamble. Five products, one ecosystem:
- Digital Twin — simulate layout, flow and line balancing to de-risk CAPEX before you spend it. Test 2–3 scenarios, find the real bottleneck, walk into the investment committee with defensible ROI.
- Marketplace — structured automation sourcing: define the challenge, AI-match to verified integrators, compare offers apples-to-apples under an NDA-first workflow. Sourcing drops from months to weeks, with 10–25% savings vs. sole-source.
- IoT — an industrial layer for machine status, real downtime reasons and shift-level OEE, with edge validation and retrofit for legacy machines. Start with 1–3 stations, scale on proof.
- IRIS — the plant operating system tying MES, CMMS, WMS, QMS, KPI and tasks into one source of truth, with a 4–8 week proof-of-value.
- Consultify — the AI transformation OS: maturity assessments, initiative portfolio, board-ready business cases and ROI tracking.
On a floor where everyone is being sold the big vision, that’s a genuinely differentiated, low-risk entry point — and it’s a reason to stop at our stand whether the visitor came for humanoids, AMRs or vision.
What visitors can see and discuss at the stand
Every demo at the DBR77 stand is built to do one thing: move a visitor from “interesting” to “let’s scope my line.” We don’t give product tours — we open with the visitor’s decision and let the screen close the argument.
See your own bottleneck, live — Digital Twin. Walk up, describe your line, and within minutes watch a simulation rank your real constraints and compare two or three investment scenarios side by side. This is the demo that turns a curious passer-by into a qualified lead — because nobody else on the floor lets you de-risk a CAPEX decision before you spend the capital. The takeaway they leave with: “I can prove the ROI to my board before I commit.”
Source automation in weeks, not months — Marketplace, live in-browser. We create a real automation Challenge on the spot, let AI match it to verified integrators, and show offers coming back in one comparable format under an NDA-first workflow. The number that lands: sourcing cycles cut from 6–12 weeks to days, and 10–25% savings versus sole-source. Procurement and engineering visitors feel this one immediately.
Watch a machine signal become a shop-floor action — IoT. A live loop: status capture, a real downtime-reason declaration, OEE on the dashboard, and an alert firing a task into an operator’s hands. We show retrofit on legacy machines and the “start with 1–3 stations, scale on proof” path — the answer to “our machines are too old to connect.”
Run the whole plant from one screen — IRIS. The operational cockpit in action: KPI definitions, a CMMS work order, a GEMBA task with owner, SLA and escalation, and the AI assistant pulling it together. The message: one source of truth across MES, maintenance, quality and tasks — with a proof-of-value in 4–8 weeks, not a year.
Turn strategy into a board-ready case — Consultify. From maturity assessment to an AI-generated initiative portfolio to a business case with NPV, IRR and payback — the demo that speaks directly to the CFO and the owner.