There is no publicly traded company whose primary business is making clothing for robots. There is no venture-backed startup with $50 million in funding dedicated to robot garments. The robot clothing industry in 2026 consists of a small number of companies, most of them private, most of them small, most of them operating in near-total obscurity. And yet, these companies are building something that will matter enormously within the next five years. Here is our annual assessment of who is doing what.
Maison Roboto (Paris, France)
Maison Roboto occupies a unique position in this market: a Paris-based luxury fashion house focused exclusively on couture garments for humanoid robots. Located on the rue Saint-Honore, one of the most storied fashion addresses in the world, the company designs bespoke outfits and uniforms for platforms including the Tesla Optimus and XPeng IRON.
The luxury positioning is deliberate. Rather than chasing the volume market (standardized uniforms for fleet deployments), Maison Roboto targets the high end: custom-designed garments made with premium materials and traditional couture techniques adapted for robotic bodies. Their couturiers in Paris work with fabrics sourced globally from France, Italy, and Japan, with many pieces custom made in-house.
What makes Maison Roboto interesting beyond its branding is the implicit bet that robot fashion will have a luxury tier. In human fashion, the luxury segment drives cultural influence far beyond its market share. A Chanel runway show does not just sell dresses. It sets the aesthetic direction for the entire industry. If robot fashion develops the same dynamic, the company that occupies the luxury position early will wield outsized influence on what robot clothing looks like everywhere. Maison Roboto appears to be making that bet.
The risk is timing. The luxury market depends on customers who care about status and aesthetics, which requires a critical mass of robots in public-facing roles where appearance matters. That critical mass is approaching but has not yet arrived. Maison Roboto is early, possibly very early. But in fashion, early and well-positioned often beats late and well-funded.
Rocket Road (Fukuoka, Japan)
Rocket Road has been making robot clothing since 2016, making it one of the oldest companies in the space. Founded by Yukinori Izumi, who studied Zen Buddhism in college, worked in space design, pursued professional wrestling, and spent time in Silicon Valley before returning to Japan, the company brings an eclectic sensibility to robot fashion.
Rocket Road's client list includes SoftBank Robotics, Sony, and Sharp. The company produces both functional protective covers for industrial robotic arms (available in over 40 colors and multiple material specifications including dustproof, water-repellent, heat-resistant, and anti-bacterial) and fashion-forward garments for customer-facing social robots.
Izumi has spoken publicly about the specific engineering challenges of robot clothing. The weight of clothing affects a robot's balance sensors. Heat produced by electric components creates fire risk if the wrong materials are used. Garments must not impede mechanical function. These are not theoretical concerns; they are lessons learned from years of production experience with real robots in real commercial deployments.
Rocket Road's advantage is depth of platform experience. No other company has worked with as many robot platforms over as long a period. That institutional knowledge, knowing what fabric weights trigger balance recalibration on a Pepper, which attachment methods survive the vibration profile of a robotic arm, how to cut patterns around Sony's AIBO sensors, is extraordinarily difficult to replicate.
Figure AI (Internal Soft Goods Team, Sunnyvale, USA)
Figure AI is not a robot clothing company. It is a robotics company. But its decision to ship the Figure 03 with integrated, removable, washable knitwear makes it one of the most significant players in the robot clothing space. Figure's soft goods team designed the multi-density foam and textile covering that serves as the robot's default exterior surface.
The significance is not the garment itself (a functional knit covering optimized for safety and maintenance) but the precedent it sets. Figure demonstrated that a major robotics company considers clothing a core system component, not an afterthought. The tool-free removal system, the machine-washable fabric, and the integrated foam padding establish design standards that other manufacturers will reference.
Figure's covering also creates a platform for third-party garment design. If the mounting system is documented and standardized, independent designers could create alternative coverings for the Figure 03. This aftermarket potential mirrors the smartphone case industry, and it represents a significant commercial opportunity for external startups.
The robot clothing industry is almost entirely a greenfield. There are no established supply chains, no dominant brands, no proven distribution channels. Everything is being built from scratch, right now, by a handful of companies most people have never heard of.
ASP / Advanced Sealing and Protection (Germany)
ASP is the veteran of this list. The German company has been manufacturing protective covers for industrial robots since the 1990s. Their products are functional, not fashionable: heavy-duty fabric shells that protect welding robots, painting robots, and clean-room robots from environmental hazards. The company offers custom-engineered solutions for virtually any industrial robot platform.
ASP's relevance to the humanoid robot clothing market is their manufacturing expertise and deep understanding of the practical requirements. They know how to make fabric survive extreme heat, chemical exposure, and continuous mechanical cycling. As the market expands from industrial covers to humanoid garments, ASP has the manufacturing backbone to produce at scale. What they lack is design sensibility for customer-facing aesthetics. A partnership between ASP's manufacturing capability and a design-led startup's creative direction would be formidable.
Bonuni (Fukuoka, Japan)
Bonuni is a uniform manufacturer, not a robot company. But they moved into robot uniforms early, producing branded garments for Pepper robots deployed by Nissan, Mizuho Bank, and other Japanese corporations. Their garments are engineered to be flexible, heat-dispersing, and non-interfering with Pepper's mechanical function.
Bonuni represents a category rather than a single company: the established uniform manufacturer that expands into robot garments. Companies like Cintas, Aramark, and UniFirst in the United States, and dozens of uniform manufacturers across Asia and Europe, are potential entrants in this category. The ones that move first will capture the fleet-uniform market that represents the largest near-term revenue opportunity in robot clothing.
Academic Labs to Watch
MIT Media Lab, Sartorial Robots project. The Personal Robots Group at MIT has established design principles for robotic systems that use clothing for social interaction. Their Zipperbot project, a robotic continuous closure for fabric edge joining, explores autonomous garment manipulation. This is foundational research, not commercial product development, but the intellectual framework they are building will underpin commercial applications.
Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. CMU co-hosted a Robot Fashion Show at the 2025 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots in Seoul. The event featured robots in metallic fabric and sculptural garments, blending engineering with artistic expression. CMU's work focuses on safety and interaction, including garments with air-filled vests that soften a robot's frame for safer human contact. This kind of research, merging safety engineering with garment design, addresses problems that commercial companies will need solutions for within years.
Istituto Marangoni (Milan). Their Master's in Product Design for Human-Robot Interaction is training the next generation of designers who can work at the intersection of fashion and robotics. The programme covers user experience, materials engineering, and the psychology of human-machine interaction. Major fashion brands including Chanel, Coperni, and Schiaparelli have engaged with the school's robot-fashion curriculum.
The Gaps in the Market
Several obvious opportunities remain unfilled.
No off-the-rack robot clothing retailer exists. There is no Amazon or Zalando for robot garments. When platform volumes reach the level where standardized sizing is possible (Tesla Optimus will likely be the first), a dedicated retailer or marketplace will become viable.
No garment-as-a-service provider at scale. The Cintas model, uniform rental with laundering, repair, and replacement included, does not yet exist for robot garments. The first company to build this service for fleet operators will capture a significant recurring-revenue business.
No conductive garment manufacturer. Despite the research progress in e-textiles and sensor-embedded fabrics, no company currently manufactures conductive garments specifically for robots at commercial scale. The first to bridge the gap between laboratory prototypes and production-ready smart garments will own a lucrative niche.
No robot garment pattern marketplace. When 3D knitting and automated manufacturing become standard, a digital marketplace for robot garment patterns (similar to Etsy for physical goods, but for manufacturing files) would enable distributed production at global scale. This model is discussed in academic papers but does not yet exist commercially.
The State of Play
The robot clothing industry in 2026 is where the smartphone accessory industry was in 2008. The underlying platform (humanoid robots) is real and growing. The demand for accessories (clothing) is obvious but latent. A few companies are building products. Most of the world has not yet noticed the opportunity.
The companies listed here are not guaranteed to succeed. Small companies in nascent markets face enormous risks: platform dependency, capital constraints, timing mismatches between their readiness and the market's. But they are the ones doing the work. They are the ones accumulating the platform knowledge, manufacturing expertise, and customer relationships that will be extraordinarily valuable when the humanoid robot market reaches scale.
By 2028, this list will look very different. Some of these companies will have grown significantly. Others will have been acquired or folded. New entrants, possibly from the traditional fashion industry, the uniform sector, or the athletic wear market, will have appeared. The field is wide open. The race has barely started.
For a deeper assessment of individual companies, see our critical review of robot fashion studios. For market projections and investment analysis, see our 2026 market report.