The next time you board a flight, it will be with the knowledge that a humanoid robot may have helped build the airplane.
Airbus, Boeing’s primary rival in producing passenger aircraft, has reached a deal with China-based robotics company UBTech. According to Bloomberg, the aerospace company wants to have UBTech’s Walker S2 bots, which stand about 5 feet 9 inches tall, integrated into production lines.
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UBTech says the Walker S2 is specifically designed for applications like industrial manufacturing and warehouse and logistics. The bot comes with lots of fairly common features like dexterous hands, flexible design, and enhanced perception and awareness. But what sets the Walker S2 apart from its humanoid contemporaries is its battery-swapping ability. The bot can walk over to a charging station when it’s low on juice and pop in a fresh battery in a matter of minutes, resulting in very little production downtime.
For Airbus, which delivered nearly 800 aircraft to more than 90 customers in 2025, the deal marks a larger leap into robotics. The company has already made extensive investments in both automation and robotics. That includes the Medium-Sized Drilling Robot, Airbus’ first robot developed completely in-house. It’s a lot smaller than similar industry standard bots and it covers 87% of all pre-assembly-line drilling needs for fuselages, horizontal and vertical tail planes, and center wing boxes.
For UBTech, which has been mass producing the Walker S2, the vote of confidence from Airbus provided a major stock boost and a potentially massive contract.
For the rest of us, the collaboration means putting an awful lot of trust in humanoid robots, which have made headlines lately for falling on their face in front of a crowd and kicking their human friends in the groin.
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