HUMANOIDS
Robots on the line
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At the Ford Innovation Centre in Cologne, Germany, safety barriers cordon off a section of the factory floor. Inside this area a solitary figure dressed in a Ford t-shirt, lifts plastic containers and car parts, picking them up from one bench only to travel a few feet and set them down on a different bench.
S o far, so ordinary. is a humanoid robot, comprising a shiny black head, human style-torso and a hinged base where its legs should be, set on a swivel pedestal and a base the size of a small coffee table. The machine, which recently completed a Proof of Concept (POC) trial inside one of Europe’s most advanced automotive facilities offers a glimpse into what the near future of manufacturing could look like. Unlike most humanoid The only difference? the figure in question
trials, which tend to focus on controlled, repetitive processes in a lab environment, the robot, Alpha HMND 01, developed by UK-based robotics startup Humanoid, was set the challenge by Ford to complete real- world workflows – the sort of thing that real people actually do on its assembly lines – and to do them on a real factory floor (albeit a roped off area of one). Artem Sokolov, Humanoid’s Russian born founder, explains the challenges: “Even though a POC isn’t a full deployment yet, it’s already very different from a lab – there’s more
variability, more movement, more unpredictability,” he tells Automation News . “Some elements were adapted for the demo, for example, navigation was tuned to that specific environment. To scale this to a full plant, we would need much more advanced mapping and safety validation,” he adds. “Energy is another practical challenge: we demonstrated around 60 minutes of operation, but for real industrial use, longer endurance is required, so battery scaling or swap/charging strategies become important.”
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