Hexagon Is Turning AEON Into a Factory Humanoid Strategy

Hexagon's AEON is becoming an industrial deployment program

Hexagon used its Capital Markets Day today to put harder numbers on its robotics push with Investment in the division reported to double from €24 million in 2025 to €50 million in 2026. Pilots with BMW, Schaeffler, Pilatus, and Fill are underway and robotics is being excluded from Hexagon's 2026-2030 financial targets and will instead be disclosed quarterly, giving the market a direct read on the division's performance separate from the core group.

About AEON

AEON was introduced in June 2025 and positioned from the start as an industrial humanoid. The platform is 165 centimetres tall, weighs 60 kilograms, and has 34 degrees of freedom. It moves on wheels rather than feet, reaching 2.5 metres per second on flat factory floors, and swaps its own battery in 23 seconds, enabling continuous operation. Its sensor suite covers 22 integrated inputs including LiDAR, depth, infrared, SLAM cameras, and microphones. NVIDIA Jetson Orin handles onboard compute; training runs through the NVIDIA Isaac platform, which reduced locomotion development from several months to a few weeks. Maxon provides the actuators that drive locomotion. Microsoft Azure handles scalable model development and training infrastructure.

A somewhat unique design choice, AEON posseses a mechanism in the wrist that allows it to swap it’s own battery.

About Hexagon

Hexagon AB gives AEON a different starting point for usual humanoid operations. The wider group generates about €5.4 billion in annual net sales and has roughly 24,500 employees across 50 countries, with operations spanning Manufacturing Intelligence, Infrastructure & Geospatial and Autonomous Solutions, alongside a Robotics division now in its investment phase with Hexagon Robotics based in Zurich.

Hexagon’s core business already sits close to the factory problem: precision measurement, positioning, sensor fusion, metrology, geospatial data and industrial software. AEON carries that stack into a mobile, task-capable robotic platform, using the same measurement, digital reality and spatial-intelligence logic Hexagon has sold into industrial environments for years.

Deployments

Previously Schaeffler and Hexagon partnered securing a successful pilot phase. AEON used its sensor suite and wheel-based locomotion to demonstrate high-precision manipulation capabilities in operating a multi-machine station to load, unload, and inspect parts in an actual manufacturing operation. Building on the successful pilot, the companies now plan to deploy the robots across multiple sites, with additional applications such as automated part inspection targeted for rollout starting at the end of 2026. Schaeffler plans at least 1,000 AEON deployments across its global factory network by 2032. The deal also covers a supply agreement: Schaeffler provides rotary actuators for key AEON joints, making it both a customer of the platform and a component supplier into it.

BMW and hexagon announced a recent pilot at BMW Plant Leipzig which is currently launching the first European pilot project involving a humanoid robot in the BMW Group production network, carried out in collaboration with Hexagon, a longstanding partner of the BMW Group in sensor technologies and software. AEON's initial test deployment at Leipzig took place in December 2025. A further test is underway in April 2026, ahead of full pilot integration in summer 2026, where two AEON units will operate simultaneously across high-voltage battery assembly and component manufacturing for exterior parts. BMW has set up a Centre of Competence for Physical AI in Production to coordinate evaluation and integration across its network. Leipzig was chosen because it is BMW's most technologically comprehensive German plant, combining battery production, injection moulding, press shop, body shop, and final assembly in one site.

Source: BMW press release

Fill Maschinenbau, the most recently announced pilot, covers a different slice of the industrial stack. Hexagon and Fill are integrating AEON into Fill's manufacturing solutions for machine tending, inspection, and operational support, tasks that represent a practical entry path for humanoids: bounded, repetitive, tied to existing equipment, and structured enough to engineer around without needing general-purpose capability. Pilatus, a Swiss aircraft manufacturer, is the fourth named pilot, adding an aerospace-adjacent production environment to the program.

Hexagon's position is structurally different from most humanoid bets. The robot is owned by a company that already sells the sensing, software, and spatial intelligence layers that industrial deployments require. The partnerships with Schaeffler, BMW, Fill, and Pilatus represent four different entry points into manufacturing, each testing the system against a different set of constraints. The next signal is whether the summer BMW pilot and the end-2026 Schaeffler inspection rollout deliver results that hold up under production conditions.