Hexagon Robotics President Arno Rober talks with NEXT host John Koetsier about preparing AEON humanoid robots for factory work, including a planned path to 1,000 robots with Schaeffler.
Rober says deploying a thousand robots requires planning for a fleet across multiple factories, rather than multiplying one robot doing one task. AEON is designed for tasks including manipulation, moving boxes, inspection, and reality capture, so customers can assign robots where demand shifts. He cites work with BMW moving a spoiler between production lines.
Rober describes using simulation, synthetic data, and recorded data to train robots. Factory tasks need customer-specific data, so Hexagon developed a way to train with it while protecting it. AEON's sensors capture both the task and its surroundings, allowing real-world results and changes in the environment to feed back into training.
Rober distinguishes pilot feasibility from production readiness, which requires repeatable performance and scale. He gives the example of completing a task 100 times during a six-hour shift and being able to replicate performance across 100 robots. Hexagon focuses on cycle time and human intervention as key measures, with the goal of autonomous operation.
Rober says Hexagon plans to keep AEON on wheels, which support mobility between tasks and can also handle stairs and obstacles. He describes a future factory where autonomy and human-robot interaction coexist. Robots could address bottlenecks such as limited inspection staffing, freeing experienced workers to solve problems and improve workflows.
Rober describes a stepwise path toward Schaeffler's thousand-robot ambition: train AEON in the ChEGym, an exact replica of the production environment, then deploy and scale. Training can be replicated across many robots, while testing multiple use cases helps identify which tasks are ready to scale. More difficult tasks can be revisited as the technology improves.
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Arno Rober, president of Hexagon Robotics, talks with John Koetsier on NEXT about preparing Aeon robot fleets for factory work, including the Schaeffler plan to train, deploy, and scale toward 1,000 robots.
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