Before we built anything, we gathered 161 competitor exhibitor profiles at Robotics & Automation 2026, NEC Birmingham.
The finding that mattered to us was about provenance rather than quality. Among the companion and security robots we catalogued as reaching UK buyers, the overwhelming majority were designed and manufactured outside the United Kingdom. Data gathered inside a British home therefore tends to come to rest on infrastructure governed by another country’s law, and a British buyer’s practical recourse — someone to write to, a regulator who will take the complaint — is thinner than they would assume.
Now the honest limits. This is one exhibition, on one set of dates, in one country. An exhibitor list is a record of who paid for a stand, not a census of a market: companies selling into Britain without exhibiting are invisible to it. We counted profiles, not units sold, so it says nothing about market share. And we compiled it ourselves, which makes us an interested party.
It is not a market forecast and we will not dress it up as one. It is the evidence we had when we decided there was room for a British option, and we would rather show you the study with its edges than assert the conclusion without it.