Humanoid completes Siemens proof of concept for industrial logistics

Humanoid completes Siemens proof of concept for industrial logistics

Humanoid, a UK-based AI and robotics company, and Siemens have completed a proof of concept demonstrating the use of humanoid robots in industrial logistics, with Humanoid's HMND 01 wheeled Alpha robot deployed in live operations at a Siemens facility.

Humanoid was founded in 2024 by Artem Sokolov, who previously scaled a family manufacturing business to a $1 billion capitalisation before leaving to start a robotics company from scratch. Sokolov's interest in robotics grew from direct exposure to repetitive industrial labor; his grandparents spent their working lives in a jewelry production environment, and his later experience managing manufacturing operations at scale reinforced his view that automation was most effective when it removed routine and physically demanding work from people rather than displacing skilled roles. He is also founder and general partner of SKL.vc, a data-driven venture builder, and founder of Golden Falcon Capital. Humanoid has raised $50 million in founder-led capital and is preparing for a Series A. The company operates from London, with offices in Boston and Vancouver, and has assembled a team of over 200 engineers and researchers.

The HMND 01 platform comes in two variants: a wheeled model combining a humanoid upper body with a wheeled platform, and a bipedal version. The wheeled variant stands 220 centimetres tall, carries payloads of up to 15 kilograms with both arms, and has a reach spanning from floor level to two metres. The bipedal version has 29 degrees of freedom and is equipped with RGB cameras, depth sensors, and 6D force/torque sensors; both variants run end-to-end reasoning and skills powered by NVIDIA's physical AI stack. Humanoid built the wheeled version in seven months and the bipedal in five, against an industry average of 18 to 24 months. The company's KinetIQ framework, which combines vision-language model and vision-language-action capabilities, powers the onboard intelligence.

The Siemens proof of concept was structured in two phases; the first focused on in-house development and demonstration, during which Humanoid built a physical twin of the deployment environment to support testing, optimisation, and rapid iteration. The second phase moved the robot on-site at Siemens' Electronics Factory in Erlangen, Germany, for a two-week live deployment under real operational conditions. The task was a tote-to-conveyor destacking workflow in which the robot autonomously picked totes from a storage stack, transported them to a conveyor, and placed them at designated pickup points for human operators, repeating the sequence until the stack was fully empty. When Siemens disclosed full operational metrics at Hannover Messe in April 2026, the robot had reached a throughput of 60 container moves per hour, a pick-and-place success rate above 90%, and had run continuously for over eight hours.

The deployment is part of the broader Siemens and NVIDIA strategic partnership, announced at CES, to build fully AI-driven, adaptive manufacturing sites; Siemens Xcelerator provides the factory-grade integration and scalability layer. The three-way structure gives the Siemens POC more structural weight than a standalone bilateral trial; it connects Humanoid's hardware and AI to both an industrial software platform and a compute infrastructure already deployed at manufacturing scale.

The Siemens announcement landed two days after Humanoid disclosed a strategic partnership with Schaeffler, the German motion technology company. The Schaeffler partnership is aimed at deploying hundreds of Humanoid robots across Schaeffler's factories, with alignment on systems, data, safety, and operations to move from pilots to large-scale deployment. The HMND 01 wheeled variant had previously been used in a near-production Schaeffler trial for picking metallic bearing rings. The two announcements in the same week marked Humanoid's clearest public signal of its industrial validation strategy: multiple named partners, specific tasks, live factory environments.

As of mid-2025, Humanoid had signed a non-binding pre-order agreement covering up to 2,000 units with one international company and was in talks with several others, targeting at least 5,000 non-binding and 1,000 binding orders by the end of 2025. The Siemens POC is a completed proof of concept at a single facility, not a commercial deployment or production order. The partnership is described as the first step in a broader validation programme; no production volumes, pricing, or deployment timeline for the Siemens relationship have been disclosed.

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