Swedish technology company Hexagon, through its Robotics division, has announced a new humanoid robot called AEON, which the company said combines its own sensor suite “with advanced locomotion, AI-driven mission control, and spatial intelligence” to address use cases across sectors such as automotive, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.
Hexagon partner Nvidia played a huge role in AEON’s development via its physical AI “three-computer solution,” including its DGX platform with NeMo agentic AI and Project GROOT capabilities; Nvidia’s Omniverse simulation and digital twin platform; and its Jetson Thor robotics edge computing system.
Arnaud Robert, President, Hexagon's Robotics division said in a statement, “With AEON, we’re advancing physical AI to tackle real operational challenges – bridging cutting-edge technology with practical industry needs. 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 is partnering with Schaeffler and Pilatus to pilot AEON across manipulation, machine tending, part inspection, and reality capture use cases.
Roman Emmenegger, VP Manufacturing, Pilatus, said of the company’s plans for AEON, “Facing today’s challenges of manufacturing in Switzerland, we believe that AEON will become a contributing solution in sustaining our competitiveness in more than ever tougher global markets. Its unique locomotion, sensors, and on-board intelligence provides for agility and versatility and opens a multitude of opportunities to drive automation and digitisation in our daily operations.”
Sebastian Jonas, Senior Vice President Advanced Production Technology at Schaeffler, added, "By leveraging disruptive technologies such as humanoid robots, Schaeffler paves the way to becoming the leading motion technology company. We are excited to pilot Hexagon Robotics' humanoid solutions across a range of use cases in our factories and to share our decades of knowledge in the fields of manufacturing and vertical integration,” added Sebastian Jonas, Senior Vice President Advanced Production Technology at Schaeffler.
Hexagon’s announcement came one week after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during his keynote speech at GTC Paris at VivaTech 2025, proclaimed, “Humanoid robots are going to be a thing. [It’s] going to be potentially one of the largest industries ever.”
Huang went on to call the notion of a “a billion robots around the world… a very sensible thing,” bit added that the robotics industry is still on a long journey to hit that mark because “today's robots are too hard to program. Only the largest companies can afford to install a robot, get it to teach it, program it to do exactly the right things, keep it sufficiently surrounded so that it's safe.”
He said that things are changing with the development of Nvidia’s physical AI capabilities. “We're going to give you essentially robots where you could teach them,” he said. “They'll learn from you. Just as we're talking about agentic AI, we now have human AI that can learn from your teaching using [our] toolkits.”