The largest international robotics exhibition was held from December 3 to 6, allowing robot manufacturers from both the industrial and service sectors to reveal the latest and greatest advances in robotics with 673 exhibitors and more than 156,000 visitors in Tokyo to witness the new era of intelligent machines.

IREX 2025 brought as the event theme for this edition Sustainable Societies through Robotics, the objective is to stand out as humans and steal social challenges, in this atmosphere of a Hightech fair, physical AI and humanoid robots dominated the conversations indicating that it was not just a sample of equipment, but a collective vision of the future under construction.

Each stand offered a promise, Robots capable of interacting with the real world in ways previously unimaginable, suggesting that the border between science fiction and everyday life has never been so tenuous.

For the first time, robots demonstrated an almost human-like ability to perceive and react in real time to the environment, at the Fanuc and Yaskawa stands, crowds gathered to see mechanical arms that replanned their movements on their own to avoid people invading their work area.

In another corner, a clever packing system placed larger items on the bottom and fragile ones on top, learning to organize boxes like an experienced employee would. This trend, dubbed physics, unites artificial intelligence, sensors and robotics to give robots something similar to situational instinct.

The result is machines that no longer execute just pre-programmed actions, but rather make small adaptive decisions, blurring the line between an obedient tool and a perceptive agent. It's an exciting foundation, although it forces us to think about what happens when a robot begins to act on its own, even on a small scale in the world around us.

One of the most disturbing cinematic scenarios of the fair was seeing robberies assembling other robots and a Nachi Fujikoshi stand articulated arms operating together assembling robotic components with impeccable efficiency. Metal parts came to life in the hands of other machines in a precise industrial valet without human intervention.

Seeing machines giving rise to new machines, although still in rudimentary form, provokes a mixture of technological admiration and a subtle cold chill. We are witnessing the beginning of a self-sufficient mechanical forge.