By: Sean Guerre & Sylvia Ibarra, Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition (Autonomy Global Media Partner)
Ten years ago, a small group of energy professionals gathered in Houston with a clear belief that drones and robotics would transform how the industry inspects and maintains infrastructure. That belief proved correct. Today, utilities fly fixed-wing drones up to 77 miles on a single BVLOS mission. Robots perform sandblasting, welding and painting on live assets. AI platforms process massive inspection datasets and generate maintenance decisions without requiring humans to review every frame. In short, robotics, 3D reality capture, and industrial AI now operate together in real-world energy environments and the event reflects that reality. The 10th Annual Energy Drone & Robotics Summit takes place June 22–24, 2026, at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott in Houston. The community will reflect on a decade of progress and define what comes next.
A Full Industrial Intelligence Stack for Drones & Robotics; The Right Crowd
This year, the event serves as the anchor of InnovateEnergy Week, which brings together the EDR Summit, the Industrial Digital Reality Summit, and the Industrial AI Nexus Summit in one location. Two simultaneous general session tracks will run Monday through Wednesday. At the same time, we will host a live Demo Zone and Innovation Zone on the expo floor.
The event also has three co-located forums: the Energy Security and Counter-UAS, the invite-only Operators Forum and the Emergency Management UAS Forum with DRONERESPONDERS.
We expect over 1,800 attendees, including teams from over 400 energy and utility companies. The people who attend include hundreds UAV program leaders, robotics operations directors, data and AI decision-makers, offshore inspection managers and GIS leads. These professionals actually deploy these technologies at scale and make the calls that shape what gets adopted across the sector. One conversation here, as our team puts it, can shortcut months of trial and error.
Content That Comes from the Field, Not a Slide Deck
We have stacked the agenda this year with people who have actually done the thing they’re presenting on, in the form of post-mortems and playbooks from already existing programs.
In the Operators Forum on Monday morning, Utilities will walk through how they automated vision and reporting for utility inspections. TC Energy plans to present a case study on corrosion detection at scale. We will hear all the details of a 77-mile, single-mission fixed-wing BVLOS pipeline inspection.
The Oil and Gas Asset Owner/Operator Panel on Monday afternoon will bring together program leaders from Aramco, Dow, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BASF, Devon Energy and Imperial Oil, moderated by the American Petroleum Institute.
Tuesday’s Utility Asset Owner/Operator Roundtable will feature PG&E, Southern Company, Duke Energy, and Ameren. Be sure to join these rooms if you want to know what the largest energy companies in the world are actually deploying right now.
BVLOS: Past the Approvals, Into the Hard Part
Getting a beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) waiver used to be the finish line. Now operators are realizing it was just the starting gun. Tuesday’s roundtable, “BVLOS in Energy: What’s Now and Next,” gathers together operators from Shell, Devon Energy and Southern Company to address what it takes to move from regulatory approval to a repeatable, internal inspection program. The session will dive into the regulatory distinctions between 44807, Part 91 and the incoming Part 108. It will also explore electronic conspicuity, the digital visibility layer that will be essential to enabling BVLOS at scale in shared airspace. If you’ve got the approvals but are still figuring out how to industrialize the workflow, this is another session you won’t want to miss.
Robotics, with AI, That Actually Works on Energy Assets
The robotics content this year has moved well past inspections. Sessions cover fabric maintenance robots delivering measurable return on investment (ROI) through robotic cleaning, coating removal and surface preparation for API 653 inspection readiness. BP plans to present their experience vetting, adopting and deploying robotics in the Gulf. A dedicated offshore track will cover issues from topside assets to the seabed. It includes a roundtable of asset owners led by MFE Offshore and a case study from Hydromea on the specific challenges of 3D reconstruction and high-bandwidth data transmission underwater.
The “Robotics and Drone Ecosystems That Scale” panel will also tackle something that doesn’t get discussed enough, what happens when you’re combining hardware from multiple OEMs, autonomy software from another vendor, analytics from a third and a service provider to run it all. Making those ecosystems work, without breaking interoperability or accountability, is one of the most practical challenges operators wrestle with right now.
Finally, there’s a Physical AI thread running through the week, with speakers from Persona AI, Nascent Scale, NVIDI, and Cognite on what embodied intelligence looks like for industrial environments in the near term.
Industrial Intelligence: The Data Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
The future of manufacturing AI will be built on infrastructure that lasts. That theme runs through the Track B program all week. Jonathan Alexander of Albemarle will open Tuesday morning with a session on how his company delivered over $150 million in annual improvements by building what he calls an “AI Highway,” which fuses the AVEVA PI Asset Framework with machine learning, generative AI and Databricks to standardize analytics across global operations. Dan Isaacs of the Digital Twin Consortium will address the evolution from traditional digital twin models to AI-driven, multi-agent systems. Pieter van Schalkwyk of XMPro will cover the governance and data architecture that makes agentic AI viable at industrial scale, and why most organizations aren’t ready for that conversation yet. Wednesday will feature a refreshingly candid panel called “Failure to Launch,” in which practitioners share unfiltered case studies on where industrial AI deployments break down and what they’d do differently.
The New Forum You Probably Didn’t Expect, But Definitely Need
Drones aren’t just tools anymore. For some actors, they’re weapons. DHS has explicitly warned U.S. energy companies about nation-state targeting of critical infrastructure. Yet, the energy sector has been slow to confront this reality. NERC’s GridEx VIII findings confirm the industry’s current defenses aren’t built for aerial threats. And right now, most operators can legally observe a threatening drone approaching their facility, but can’t do anything about it until it lands. For this reason, we created the inaugural Energy Security and Counter-UAS Forum. It will run Wednesday morning and is included with any All-Access pass.
The SAFERSKIES Act provisions in the FY2026 NDAA have started to change the reality on the ground by giving state and local law enforcement new detection and mitigation authorities near designated critical infrastructure sites. But the frameworks are new, the technology decisions are complex and most security teams are building their playbooks in real time.
The forum’s centerpiece panel, “From Fence Line to Skyline,” will feature candid accounts from asset owners and the American Petroleum Institute on what they’ve actually deployed, where the gaps are and how they’re coordinating with law enforcement. Another dedicated technical session will walk through why jamming can be a challenge in refinery and chemical plant environments and what RF cyber takeover technology actually does. The regulatory session with DRONERESPONDERS will cover the NERC CIP-014 trajectory and the FY2026 NDAA framework. If you want to learn how C-UAS is moving from optional investment to mandatory compliance, join these sessions. Don’t simply wait for the regulations to tell you what to build.
The Rest of the Week
We kick off Sunday with a VIP Welcome Reception for speakers, advisory board members and operators. The invite-only Operators Forum runs Monday morning in a closed-door format with peer roundtables on BVLOS, tank and terminal inspection, fabric maintenance, offshore robotics, data operations, security and counter-UAS and scaling enterprise programs. Past participants have included teams from BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Oxy, Devon Energy, Entergy, Southern Company, and TotalEnergies. If you can get in, you should. Reach out to us.
The Emergency Management UAS Forum with DRONERESPONDERS will run Monday, with a new two-day UAS Program Management Workshop that extends through Tuesday and Wednesday. It will cover Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) development, multi-agency coordination, safety management and fleet lifecycle planning for public safety professionals.
And then there’s the networking. As always, Monday will close with our annual Howdy Reception in the Expo Hall and Tuesday with Bots and Brews. These social events are where you can make real connections.
On top of all this, VIP Pass holders gain access to the lounge, priority networking, the Sunday reception as well as full access to post-event session recordings for the entire multi-track event. With three summits and multiple forums running simultaneously, on-demand access to recordings ensures you get the full benefit of all of our content.
Ten Years Down. Now’s The Time.June is the right time for this conversation because it is early enough in the second half of the year to actually act on what you learn, but also late enough that the panelists have real data to share. The energy sector spent the first decade of this coalition proving these technologies work. The next decade is about proving they scale, safely, securely, and at the speed the industry actually needs. Learn about it by joining us as part of InnovateEnergy Week at this year’s 10th Annual Energy Drone & Robotics Summit, June 22-24, 2026, at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott, Houston, Texas. You can find registration and full details at edrcoalition.com.