Hexagon, a measurement technology company, announced the launch of its AEON humanoid robot. Designed by the company's Robotics division, Hexagon expects AEON to meet real-world customer needs and address labor shortages.
The humanoid combines Hexagon's sensor suite with advanced locomotion, AI-driven mission control and spatial intelligence. This combination enables AEON to address a wide range of industrial applications, from manipulation and asset inspection to reality capture and operator support.
AEON is made to help improve safety and drive autonomy across sectors such as automotive, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, warehousing and logistics.
"AEON represents a state-of-the-art, industrially bespoke humanoid," Hexagon Chair Ola Rollén said. "It's a leap forward in our goal to help customers drive sustainable growth in the face of structural demographic changes."
AEON's capabilities include:
- Agility: Combining dexterity and locomotion, AEON can move around quickly while also performing tasks that require high accuracy thanks to Hexagon's proprietary precision measurement technologies.
- Awareness: Bringing together spatial intelligence and reasoning, AEON merges data from multimodal sensors to understand the environment and optimise the mission given the task at hand.
- Versatility: AEON is built to perform a wide variety of tasks, from picking specific objects and scanning industrial components for inspection to creating digital twins through digital reality capture and teleoperation, all leveraging an end-to-end training approach.
- Power autonomy: With a unique battery swapping mechanism, AEON does not need to recharge to continue to operate.
"With AEON, we're advancing physical AI to tackle real operational challenges, bridging cutting-edge technology with practical industry needs," Hexagon Robotics division President Arnaud Robert said. "We have engaged with many industry leaders already, and over the next six months, we'll be deploying AEON in production environments before expanding our commercial rollout."
Hexagon's Robotics division added it plans to partner with Schaeffler and Pilatus to pilot AEON across manipulation, machine tending, part inspection and reality capture use cases.
Other established partnerships include NVIDIA, Microsoft and Maxon.
AEON is powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Jetson. Microsoft Azure's platform enables scalable development and on-demand training of AEON's capabilities. Maxon's next generation actuators power AEON's locomotion across multiple environments.
