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Mantis Robotics has introduced the MR-X, a dual-arm industrial robot built to do something most factory robots still cannot, move at full industrial speed with no fence, cage, or light curtain standing between it and a human worker. The Pleasanton, California company unveiled the robot at Automate 2026 in Chicago, where it shared a booth with its earlier single-arm model and let attendees step into the robot’s workspace to see its safety system react in real time.
Industrial robots have historically faced a blunt tradeoff, either they run fast and stay caged off from people, or they slow down enough to work safely nearby as a traditional collaborative robot, sacrificing much of the speed that makes automation worth installing in the first place. Getting real, unsupervised speed next to a human without a barrier is hard because a robot arm moving at several meters per second can seriously injure someone if it does not detect and react to an intrusion in time, and doing that reliably, without external cages, light curtains, or floor sensors as a backup, has long been treated as one of the harder unsolved problems in industrial safety engineering.
Mantis says its answer is a platform called SafetyCore, a patented reflex system built into the robot itself rather than bolted on as an external safety cell. Instead of relying on perimeter sensors or fixed keep-out zones, which is how most fenceless deployments work today, SafetyCore processes the robot’s surroundings continuously and reacts autonomously the moment a person enters its path, without halting the whole operation. That distinction, reacting locally and instantly rather than stopping everything when any sensor trips, is what the company argues lets MR-X keep working at industrial pace instead of downshifting into a cautious, slowed-down collaborative mode whenever someone walks near it.
The specs back up the speed claim. MR-X can lift up to 70 pounds and move at up to 10.6 meters per second, all within what Mantis describes as a compact footprint, and the company says it is designed to meet ISO 10218-1 and ISO 13849-1, the industry standards that govern industrial robot and machine safety. Mantis’s earlier single-arm robot, the MR-1, already carries that certification and has been used in fenceless deployments including at Amazon facilities, according to The Robot Report, which the company points to as evidence the underlying safety architecture has already been proven at scale before being extended into a dual-arm form factor.
Adding a second arm is not just a hardware upgrade, it changes what the robot can be asked to do. A single arm is largely limited to picking and placing, but two coordinated arms can hold a part steady with one hand while working on it with the other, which opens the door to bimanual assembly, material transfer, and package sorting, tasks Mantis is pitching for both manufacturing and logistics as well as emerging retail environments. The company also says MR-X can be programmed without writing code, aimed at letting floor staff reconfigure it for new tasks rather than requiring a robotics engineer every time a line changes.
Gerry Vannuffelen, Mantis’s CEO, framed the launch as proof that the company’s core bet extends beyond a single robot design. It is a first-in-class dual-arm robot that outperforms both cobots and humanoids, in terms of both speed and safety, he said, adding that MR-X shows fenceless robotics working regardless of form factor and that the company sees itself as building the technology that unlocks mass deployment in the real world, not just another single robot.
If the safety claims hold up under wider deployment, MR-X points at a broader shift already underway in factories and warehouses, one where the choice between a fast robot and a safe one stops being a real tradeoff. For an industry that has spent decades keeping people and machines apart by physical barrier, a robot that can be trusted to share the same floor space at full speed would change how automation gets laid out from the ground up.
Source: Mantis Robotics press release (PR Newswire) and The Robot Report, Automate 2026. Credit: Mantis Robotics.