Show Notes
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
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