A humanoid robot designed to handle advanced physical and technical tasks in industrial operations debuted this week, with a big technological assist from NVIDIA Corp.
Hexagon’s robotics division presented AEON, a robot in partnership with NVIDIA, with plans to put it to work in the automotive, transportation, aerospace, manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics sectors.
AEON is built to take on anything from part manipulation and inspection to asset scanning and operational support. Its secret sauce, Hexagon said, is the handling of sensitive components or working in dynamic, unpredictable settings — both of which are prone to human error.
“Our goal with AEON was to design an intelligent, autonomous humanoid that addresses the real-world challenges industrial leaders have shared with us over the past months,” Arnaud Robert, president of Hexagon’s robotics division, said in a statement.
“By leveraging NVIDIA’s full-stack robotics and simulation platforms, we were able to deliver a best-in-class humanoid that combines advanced mechatronics, multimodal sensor fusion and real-time AI,” Robert added.
Hexagon leans heavily on NVIDIA’s advanced computing resources, including artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers for training foundation models, the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for simulation testing, and NVIDIA IGX Thor robotic computers for operational deployment.
The robot autonomously scans small parts to full assembly lines, and uploads data to Hexagon’s Reality Cloud Studio via HxDR. There, teams collaborate using 3-D models built in NVIDIA Omniverse. Hexagon trained the robot almost entirely in virtual environments, using NVIDIA’s Isaac platform to speed its development.
The life-sized robot offers an early manifestation of what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang calls physical AI in factory settings. At NVIDIA’s GTC event in Paris last week, he said NVIDIA”s physical AI systems are ready to revolutionize industries, with a $50 trillion market opportunity across factories, transportation, and humanoid robots.
“The age of general-purpose robotics has arrived, due to technological advances in simulation and physical AI,” Deepu Talla, vice president of NVIDIA robotics and edge AI, said. “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.”
As part of its robotics push, NVIDIA and Deutsche Telekom recently announced Europe’s first industrial AI cloud in Germany to help that country’s manufacturing sector through applications in robotics, digital twins, engineering, design, and simulation.
Meanwhile, Foxconn of Taiwan and NVIDIA are in talks to deploy humanoid robots at a new Foxconn factory in Houston that will produce NVIDIA AI servers — the first time an NVIDIA product will be made with the assistance of humanoid robots, Reuters reported in mid-June.
While a breakthrough of sorts in robotics, AEON is just another incremental step in the evolution of physical AI, say experts in the field.
“Hexagon is a great company that can bring a lot of muscle to bear on this opportunity. And I like that they’re going straight for wheeled/legged — it’s the best morphology out there and nobody else is pushing for it,” said Jeff Linnell, the former head of robotics at Alphabet Inc.’s Google who recently launched Formant.ai.
“But I worry a bit that we may be missing the forest for the trees,” he added. “While giving the AI brain a robotic body has value, I think what’s potentially more powerful is a fleet of smart robots, joined as part of an ecosystem and gaining knowledge from AI that’s out there in the world. For example, what does it mean for a fleet of AEONs using Perplexity, or having access to your calendar or Slack, learning about your business problems and objectives? Imagine what they could achieve? I think this approach could be really transformative.”
