Mercedes-Benz is committed to empowering its staff with state-of-the-art technology – and with Apollo, Mercedes-Benz brings one of world’s most advanced commercial humanoid robots into its manufacturing facilities. To underscore its commitment to deploying humanoid robots in automotive production, Mercedes-Benz will make a low double-digit-million-euro investment into Apptronik, which was founded in 2016 at the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
Mercedes-Benz has been using industrial robotics technology since the 1970s to perform particularly monotonous and physically demanding tasks. Mercedes-Benz is currently testing the integration of humanoid robots in production with an initial focus on repetitive tasks within intralogistics. Apptronik’s Apollo can be used to transport components or modules to the production line for Mercedes-Benz’s highly skilled production staff to assemble, and to carry out initial quality checks of components.
Apollo robots have been collecting data in a production environment to train for specific use cases within MO360. Mercedes-Benz employees with real-life production know-how have transferred their knowledge to Apollo using teleoperation processes and augmented reality. Mercedes-Benz is now taking the next decisive development step at the Digital Factory Campus Berlin – enabling Apollo’s robots to perform autonomous operations, a technological milestone on the way to a flexible, intelligent assistance system for production.
In December, the AI-powered humanoid robotics company Apptronik announced that it had entered a strategic partnership agreement with the Google DeepMind robotics team to bring together best-in-class artificial intelligence with cutting-edge hardware, advancing humanoid robots that can be more helpful to people in dynamic environments.