The AEON humanoid could be used in the automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, and logistics industries. | Source: Hexagon
Hexagon AB last week launched its first humanoid robot, AEON, at its flagship Hexagon LIVE Global event. The Zurich-based company said it specifically designed AEON to meet real-world customer needs and address labor shortages.
“Hexagon’s legacy in precision measurement and sensor technologies has always been about enabling next-generation autonomy,” said Ola Rollén, the chairman of the board at Hexagon. “For the past 10 years, we’ve been working on robotics innovation across our divisions.”
“Hexagon is one of the best-placed companies in the world to lead and shape the field of humanoid robotics,” he added. “AEON represents a state-of-the-art, industrially bespoke humanoid. It’s a leap forward in our goal to help customers drive sustainable growth in the face of structural demographic changes. I’m proud to see AEON come to life.”
Hexagon claimed that AEON combines its sensor suite with advanced locomotion, AI-driven mission control, and spatial intelligence to deliver a robot that is agile, versatile, and aware. This combination enables AEON to address a wide range of industrial applications, from manipulation and asset inspection to reality capture and operator support, said the company.
In addition, Hexagon said its humanoid robot could help improve safety and drive autonomy across sectors such as automotive, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.
Humanoids have exploded in popularity in recent years, with more and more robotics companies releasing their own versions. However, commercial deployments have been slow so far. Hyundai Motor Group has plans to purchase thousands of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots in the coming years. Figure AI is also shipping its Figure 02 system to its first paying customers.
In 2024, GXO officially deployed a “small fleet” of Digit humanoids from Agility Robotics at a Spanx facility in Georgia. Later, Schaeffler AG made a minority investment in Agility and planned to buy Digit robots for use across its global plant network. These marked the first paid deployments for humanoid robots.
Hexagon lines up early pilots
Hexagon said AEON’s capabilities include:
- Agility: The bipedal robot combines dexterity and locomotion to move around quickly while also performing tasks that require high accuracy. The company said this is thanks to its proprietary precision measurement technologies.
- Awareness: Bringing together spatial intelligence and reasoning, AEON merges data from multimodal sensors to understand the environment and optimize the mission given the task at hand.
- Versatility: Hexagon asserted that it built AEON to perform a wide variety of tasks – from picking specific objects and scanning industrial components for inspection to creating digital twins through digital reality capture and teleoperation. For all of these, it said it uses an end-to-end training approach.
- Power autonomy: With a battery-swapping mechanism, AEON does not need to recharge to continue to operate.
Hexagon’s robotics division is partnering with Schaeffler and Pilatus to pilot AEON across manipulation, machine tending, part inspection, and reality-capture use cases.
“By leveraging disruptive technologies such as humanoid robots, Schaeffler paves the way to becoming the leading motion technology company,” said Sebastian Jonas, senior vice president for advanced production technology at Schaeffler. “We are excited to pilot Hexagon Robotics’ humanoid solutions across a range of use cases in our factories and to share our decades of knowledge in the fields of manufacturing and vertical integration.”
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AEON development relies on partnerships
Hexagon’s robotics division has established partnerships with technology leaders NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Maxon to bring AEON to the market. For example, AEON is powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA Omniverse, and NVIDIA Jetson.
The company is also exploring using NVIDIA accelerated computing to post-train the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.5 open foundation model to improve robot reasoning and policies. It may also tap Isaac GR00T-Mimic to generate vast amounts of synthetic motion data from a few human demonstrations.
“The age of general-purpose robotics has arrived, due to technological advances in simulation and physical AI,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “Hexagon’s new AEON humanoid embodies the integration of NVIDIA’s three-computer robotics platform and is making a significant leap forward in addressing industry-critical challenges.”
Microsoft‘s Azure platform enables scalable development and on-demand training of AEON’s capabilities. In addition, Maxon‘s next-generation actuators power AEON’s locomotion across multiple environments.
Hexagon acquired Septentrio NV, a developer of navigation technologies, in January.
NVIDIA said AEON learned many of its skills through simulations powered by the NVIDIA Isaac platform. | Source: NVIDIA
Ballencing on 2 wheels is an accident wanting to happen. I dont see that as optimum for factorys.
allmost all the socalled sales are just sampling prototypes in reality.Looks like 2 or 3 more years yet before wide real use of humanoids (industry wide).
AEON has a great design and then you see the two wheels and wonder why they decided to do that rather than give them feet, could be useful in large space warehouses or hospitals but it definitely is a unique design choice
-Ronomics.com