Hexagon AB

What it builds

Hexagon AB, the Swedish measurement-technology group, entered humanoid robotics in March 2025, when it created a Robotics division and appointed Arnaud Robert as its president. The unit is headquartered in Zurich rather than at Hexagon's Stockholm registered office, and its only product line to date is AEON, a wheeled industrial humanoid unveiled in June 2025 at the Hexagon LIVE Global event. Hexagon frames AEON as an extension of its sensor and metrology business: the robot is aimed at material handling, machine tending, part inspection and reality capture for digital twins, with teleoperation available where autonomy falls short.

Technical approach

AEON pairs a wheeled base with a humanoid upper body — trading rough-terrain mobility for stability and endurance indoors — and uses a battery-swapping mechanism intended to avoid recharge downtime. Onboard compute comes from NVIDIA Jetson, with Omniverse, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab used for simulation and training; Hexagon brought an AEON trained in those tools to the GTC 2026 show floor. In March 2026 the division said it was adopting NVIDIA IGX Thor for real-time edge processing and contributing to an open Physical AI Data Factory blueprint. A January 2026 collaboration with Microsoft covers Azure-based data management, one-shot imitation learning and multimodal model training; Hexagon says AEON has already demonstrated real-time defect detection.

Commercial traction

Hexagon named Schaeffler and Pilatus as launch pilot partners in June 2025. The Schaeffler relationship became the division's largest commitment in April 2026, when the two agreed to deploy at least 1,000 AEON units across Schaeffler's global plants over seven years, with Schaeffler also supplying precision actuators back to Hexagon. In August 2026 AEON entered Schaeffler's "Humanoid Gym" in Germany, a dedicated training site where tasks drawn from real factories are taught by imitation learning before live deployment. BMW is the other anchor customer: after a first test at Plant Leipzig in December 2025, the automaker made AEON its first European humanoid project, and in June 2026 the robot began performing production tasks there. Hexagon has not disclosed unit prices, contract values or the size of the robotics workforce.

Corporate context and positioning

The programme sits inside a listed parent and has raised no separately disclosed outside capital. Hexagon trades on Nasdaq Stockholm as HEXA B, traces its origins to a Stockholm company registered in 1975, and has been led by CEO Anders Svensson since July 2025; board chairman Ola Rollén, a former Hexagon chief executive, has been the most prominent voice for the robotics push. In May 2026 Hexagon completed the spin-off of Octave Intelligence, its software and geospatial businesses, leaving robotics as a growth line within a narrower measurement-focused group. Hexagon also publishes demand-side research, including a study that surveyed 18,000 people on attitudes toward robots. It competes for the same industrial pilots as Figure and Agility Robotics and a widening set of European entrants, though few rivals arrive with an installed metrology and sensing business as their route onto the factory floor.