The AEON humanoid could possibly be used within the automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, and logistics industries. | Supply: Hexagon
Hexagon AB final week launched its first humanoid robotic, AEON, at its flagship Hexagon LIVE International occasion. The Zurich-based firm mentioned it particularly designed AEON to fulfill real-world buyer wants and deal with labor shortages.
“Hexagon’s legacy in precision measurement and sensor applied sciences has all the time been about enabling next-generation autonomy,” mentioned Ola Rollén, the chairman of the board at Hexagon. “For the previous 10 years, we’ve been engaged on robotics innovation throughout our divisions.”
“Hexagon is without doubt one of the best-placed corporations on this planet to steer and form the sphere of humanoid robotics,” he added. “AEON represents a state-of-the-art, industrially bespoke humanoid. It’s a leap ahead in our aim to assist clients drive sustainable development within the face of structural demographic adjustments. I’m proud to see AEON come to life.”
Hexagon claimed that AEON combines its sensor suite with superior locomotion, AI-driven mission management, and spatial intelligence to ship a robotic that’s agile, versatile, and conscious. This mixture allows AEON to handle a variety of commercial functions, from manipulation and asset inspection to actuality seize and operator assist, mentioned the firm.
As well as, Hexagon mentioned its humanoid robotic may assist enhance security and drive autonomy throughout sectors reminiscent of automotive, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.
Humanoids have exploded in reputation in recent times, with an increasing number of robotics corporations releasing their very own variations. Nonetheless, business deployments have been sluggish to this point. Hyundai Motor Group has plans to buy 1000’s of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots within the coming years. Determine AI can be delivery its Determine 02 system to its first paying clients.
In 2024, GXO formally deployed a “small fleet” of Digit humanoids from Agility Robotics at a Spanx facility in Georgia. Later, Schaeffler AG made a minority funding in Agility and deliberate to purchase Digit robots to be used throughout its international plant community. These marked the primary paid deployments for humanoid robots.
Hexagon traces up early pilots
Hexagon mentioned AEON’s capabilities embody:
- Agility: The bipedal robotic combines dexterity and locomotion to maneuver round rapidly whereas additionally performing duties that require excessive accuracy. The corporate mentioned that is due to its proprietary precision measurement applied sciences.
- Consciousness: Bringing collectively spatial intelligence and reasoning, AEON merges information from multimodal sensors to know the surroundings and optimize the mission given the duty at hand.
- Versatility: Hexagon asserted that it constructed AEON to carry out all kinds of duties – from selecting particular objects and scanning industrial elements for inspection to creating digital twins by means of digital actuality seize and teleoperation. For all of those, it mentioned it makes use of an end-to-end coaching strategy.
- Energy autonomy: With a battery-swapping mechanism, AEON doesn’t must recharge to proceed to function.
Hexagon’s robotics division is partnering with Schaeffler and Pilatus to pilot AEON throughout manipulation, machine tending, half inspection, and reality-capture use instances.
“By leveraging disruptive applied sciences reminiscent of humanoid robots, Schaeffler paves the way in which to changing into the main movement know-how firm,” mentioned Sebastian Jonas, senior vice chairman for superior manufacturing know-how at Schaeffler. “We’re excited to pilot Hexagon Robotics’ humanoid options throughout a spread of use instances in our factories and to share our many years of data within the fields of producing and vertical integration.”
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AEON improvement depends on partnerships
Hexagon’s robotics division has established partnerships with know-how leaders NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Maxon to convey AEON to the market. For instance, AEON is powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA Omniverse, and NVIDIA Jetson.
The corporate can be exploring utilizing NVIDIA accelerated computing to post-train the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.5 open basis mannequin to enhance robotic reasoning and insurance policies. It might additionally faucet Isaac GR00T-Mimic to generate huge quantities of artificial movement information from just a few human demonstrations.
“The age of general-purpose robotics has arrived, because of technological advances in simulation and bodily AI,” mentioned Deepu Talla, vice chairman of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA. “Hexagon’s new AEON humanoid embodies the mixing of NVIDIA’s three-computer robotics platform and is making a major leap ahead in addressing industry-critical challenges.”
Microsoft‘s Azure platform allows scalable improvement and on-demand coaching of AEON’s capabilities. As well as, Maxon‘s next-generation actuators energy AEON’s locomotion throughout a number of environments.
Hexagon acquired Septentrio NV, a developer of navigation applied sciences, in January.
NVIDIA mentioned AEON realized a lot of its expertise by means of simulations powered by the NVIDIA Isaac platform. | Supply: NVIDIA
