Five minutes at a booth: a printable sheet for the trade show floor

MODEX 2026 drew 1,057 exhibitors across 630,000 square feet of floor [1]. Even walking briskly, you will speak to a few dozen at most. So the show floor is not where you evaluate anyone. It is where you decide who is worth evaluating later.

That is a different task, and it needs different questions. Not the deep commercial ones you ask before signing, which we have written about separately. Short ones a person standing at a booth can answer, where the pause before the answer is itself information.

One thing worth saying plainly: MHI, which runs these shows, publishes a great deal for attendees. An expo guide, floor plans, an exhibitor directory, a session planner, and templates to help you convince your manager to send you. It publishes nothing on how to evaluate the vendors once you arrive. This sheet is our attempt at the missing page.

The sheet

Print it, or keep it on your phone. Each question has a note on what a good answer sounds like.

If you only use one line, use the third in the second group: will you put that number in a pilot contract as an acceptance test? Every performance claim is free until it is contractual. The answer sorts vendors faster than anything else on the sheet, and it costs you nothing to ask.

A note on the numbers you will be quoted. We audited the pick rate and throughput claims published by several large vendors and found that not one stated the conditions it was measured under. So treat any rate you hear on the floor as a starting point for a question, not as a fact you can compare against the booth next door.

Name the right standard

Standards come up constantly at these shows, and they are easy to get wrong in a way that costs you credibility. The most common error is treating ASTM F45 as a safety credential. It is not a safety committee. It writes performance test methods.

The quote in that third row is the useful one, because it is ASTM saying it about itself. Their navigation test method states in its own scope that it does not address safety concerns. It points the reader at ANSI/ITSDF B56.5 and ISO 3691-4 instead [2]. If a vendor offers an F45 test result as evidence their machine is safe, that sentence settles it politely.

Two practical notes. B56.5, the driverless industrial vehicle safety standard, is free on request from ITSDF, which asks only for your name, company and email and that you not resell it [3]. And the mobile robot safety series has a part aimed at you rather than the maker. R15.08 part 3 covers the use of these applications, and was published in 2026 [4].

The one question to ask about safety

If you take one compliance question to the floor, take this: who produces the task-based risk assessment, and when do I see it?

OSHA's own technical manual says the assessment should be completed by the integrator, with your users and workers involved, before commissioning [5]. It also puts the point more bluntly than we would dare to: it is not enough to simply trust the integrator, or to perform a simple visual inspection alone [5].

That manual is US government text, free to read and quote, and it doubles as an evaluation checklist. One caveat we should flag. The page carries no revision date, and it still refers to the 2012 edition of the flagship robot safety standard, which was revised in 2025. So use it for its structure and its reasoning, and check editions yourself.

What to do on the plane home

Turn the shortlist into two or three requests, sent the same week while you are still a face they remember.

1. Ask for every quoted number again, in writing, with its measurement conditions attached. Per what, over how long, on what order profile.
2. Ask for one reference site that resembles yours, rather than the best site they have.
3. Ask whether the headline number can become an acceptance test in a pilot agreement. The answer to this is the real shortlist.

Then take whatever comes back and set your pass mark before anyone runs anything. That order matters more than which vendor you picked, and we say so from experience. In our own first evaluation we chose a looser bar than the benchmark's. That alone turned a dataset where nothing clears the standard into a 48.1% headline. We published the correction.

Dates, if you are planning

MODEX 2026 has already been and gone. It ran from 13 to 16 April 2026 in Atlanta. The next MHI show is ProMat 2027, in Chicago's McCormick Place from 19 to 21 April 2027 [1]. Note that it is three days rather than the usual four. MHI has also announced a third show, MODEX West, debuting in Las Vegas in October 2028. Two MHI releases published a week apart give different end dates for MODEX 2028, so we are not stating one.

Sources

Show facts are from MHI's own site and press releases, read in August 2026. We report registered visitors rather than attendance, because registration is what MHI publishes. We have deliberately left out MHI's survey statistics on automation adoption and spending: the figures we could reach are five-year predictions of intent rather than measured adoption, and the underlying report sits behind a form we did not submit.

1. MHI press release, 20 April 2026, modexshow.com: 'The 2026 event, sponsored by MHI, welcomed 50,000 registered visitors from every U.S. state and 132 countries, alongside 1,057 exhibitors covering 630,000 net square feet'; 'ProMat 2027 will be held in Chicago's McCormick Place from April 19-21, 2027.'
2. ASTM F3244-21, Standard Test Method for Navigation: Defined Area, scope clause 1.3, astm.org: 'This standard does not purport to address all of the safety concerns, if any, associated with its use. Safety standards such as ANSI/ITSDF B56.5, ISO 3691-4:2020, or other safety standards should be followed.'
3. ITSDF B56 standards page, itsdf.org: 'ANSI/ITSDF B56.5-2024, Safety Standard for Driverless, Automatic Guided Industrial Vehicles and Automated Functions of Manned Industrial Vehicles EFFECTIVE 12/16/25'; 'Copies of these standards are available for free upon request'.
4. ANSI/A3 R15.08-3-2026, American National Standard for Industrial Mobile Robots, Safety Requirements, Part 3: Use of IMR Applications, listed in the A3 standards store at automate.org.
5. OSHA Technical Manual, Section IV, Chapter 4, Industrial Robot Systems and Industrial Robot System Safety, osha.gov: 'Review the task-based risk assessment (RA) that should have been completed by integrator and with the involvement of the users and workers prior to commissioning'; 'It is not enough to simply trust the integrator or to perform a simple visual inspection alone.' The page carries no revision date and cites the 2012 edition of ANSI/RIA R15.06.