Schaeffler plans to put at least 1,000 of Hexagon's Aeon humanoids to work across its global factory network by 2032. In an industry where most deployments are still counted in single digits, that's a very big number.
How is that going to work?
How does that change things from pilots with 1 or 10 or 50 robots?
How does that change the jobs robots do?
What does that change about the jobs humans do?
In this long-form episode of Humanoid (almost) Daily, we do a deep dive with Hexagon Robotics president Arnaud Robert.
Enjoy!
00:00 What does it take to deploy 1,000 humanoids?
01:31 Why 1,000 robots changes the problem
03:02 Why humanoids need to do multiple jobs
03:55 The race for physical AI training data
04:51 Simulation, synthetic and real-world data
06:20 Hexagon's sim-to-real-to-sim loop
08:10 What robot-generated training data captures
10:21 Pilot vs. production-ready humanoids
12:14 The industrial experience advantage
13:12 The two metrics that really matter
15:39 What Hexagon learned from failure
17:35 The humanoid actuator problem
18:47 Why Aeon uses wheels instead of legs
19:59 Yes, a wheeled humanoid can climb stairs
21:28 What the factory of the future looks like
23:42 Using humanoids to eliminate bottlenecks
25:17 Automation exposes the hidden 3%
26:07 Schaeffler's path to 1,000 humanoids
27:18 Train, deploy, scale
