More Design and Automation Highlights from MDM West 2026

As regular attendees and exhibitors know, trade show booths often tend toward one of two extremes: They either disappear into a showroom floor pocket dimension that visitors can easily overlook or they create eddy currents where attendees tend to collect ‘’and loiter throughout the run of show.

In keeping with our Day 1 coverage of MD&M West 2026, the following is a short list of the stickiest booths within the Design and Automation sections of the annual MedTech show.

First off, Real Hand’s large booth, featuring dueling robotic piano players, was a natural draw this year. As the name suggests, the company specializes in robotic hands that mirror the anatomy and dexterity of the human hand, down to the number of digits and joints, as well as tactile pressure sensors in the fingertips.

Fully electric, the Real Hand’s gripper model attach to a cobot or other six-axis robotic arm using the same standardized flange as any other end effector. According to the company, their robotic hands offer a degree of adaptability well beyond that of traditional robotic grippers, by being able to grasp a wide range of variously shaped objects without customization.

While not as anthropomorphic but no less dexterous, the latest iterations of ATS Corporation’s SuperTrak smart conveyor system and modular Symphoni automation platform made for a well trafficked booth for the company.

Since ATS introduced and defined the smart linear motor conveyance concept in 2001, the system has progressed through a number generations and improvements. Recent iterations include the Horizon3 (H3) version that features tight 180-degr. turn track segments (300mm wide), a shuttle-to-shuttle pitch 50mm and acceleration up to 10g (3g with 1kg payload).

Over in the Design and Manufacturing quarter, the booth for the curiously named Bananaz.AI drew its share of attendees due in part to the large banana shaped blow-up toy handouts and literal banana swag. The company’s product bills itself as the AI co-pilot for mechanical engineers.

In essence, the co-pilot functions something like a spellcheck for design engineers, analyzing CAD geometry for things like compliance with international standards, GD&T specs and design for manufacturing (DfM) best practices. Deviations are then flagged and reported to the engineering team as the CAD files are checked in and out popular PDM/PLM systems.

Finally, Omron’s display flouted the accepted norms of tradeshow practice by dispensing with the traditional booth and replacing it with a converted cargo van that currently functions as a tech demo of the company’s automation hardware on wheels.

Inside Omron’s Mobile Technology Center, the company displays working examples of its well know automation kit, including industrial sensors, the Sysmac controller, dedicated safety and motion controllers, predictive maintenance and machine vision-based tracking systems.

For the show, the company also spotlighted its latest product, the DX100 Data Flow edge computer. Designed as an entry point for manufacturers looking to implement IIoT, the DX100 is brawny enough to host an MQTT broker or OPC-UA server while also simplifying the process of “flowing” OT data one way up the industrial IT stack, either for melding with ERP data or channeling it into a locally hosted database or out to the cloud via Node Red.

According to the Omron staff on site at the show, Omron discovered their customers had been using their Sysmac controllers “off label” to handle these data flow tasks. The natural solution therefore was the development of the DX100 as a dedicated appliance to help manufacturers build out their IIoT infrastructure.

Check out more of our MD&M West 2026 coverage here.