Renault prepares Calvin humanoids for factory work with Wandercraft

Renault began using Wandercraft’s Calvin humanoid for tyre handling at its Douai electric-vehicle plant, with plans to add hundreds of units across its manufacturing operations. The factory use followed Renault’s June 2025 minority investment in Wandercraft and commercial partnership to develop Calvin, a family of industrial robots built from Wandercraft’s self-balancing robotics work.

The Company

Wandercraft was founded in 2012 and built its early business around self-balancing medical exoskeletons. Renault described the company as the first to develop, manufacture and market medical self-balancing exoskeletons, with more than 100 Atalante devices operating in hospitals across four continents and a personal exoskeleton called Eve moving toward market entry. Wandercraft says its exoskeletons take more than one million steps each month, giving the company motion data from repeated real-world assisted walking.

Calvin extends that balance-control base into manufacturing. Wandercraft’s prior systems were built around powered walking, load transfer, fall avoidance and safe movement close to human bodies. Renault’s first application uses those capabilities for repetitive material handling on an automotive line, where the robot carries tyres rather than performing fine assembly or open-ended manipulation.

The Partnership

Renault’s June 2025 agreement made the automaker both an investor and industrial partner. The partnership covered development of Calvin first for Renault manufacturing operations, with Renault contributing industrialisation, design-to-cost and production-scaling support for Wandercraft’s robots and exoskeletons.

The agreement also gave Wandercraft a defined first customer environment for Calvin. Renault said the robot family would be used to relieve workers from painful and non-ergonomic tasks while reducing production time. By March 2026, the first public application was tyre handling at Douai, a repetitive load-moving task inside Renault’s EV production network.

The Robot

Calvin-40 is a headless bipedal industrial robot developed with Renault. Wandercraft’s product page says the Calvin family was developed in collaboration with Renault and that Calvin-40 was developed in 40 days. Reporting around Renault’s factory plan describes the robot as able to lift about 40 kg, use waist-mounted cameras and communicate status through LED lights.

The robot’s design is built around load movement. The public factory task uses bipedal balance and carrying capacity for tyre handling, with the robot operating on a production line rather than in a clinical or research setting. The headless form also keeps the machine closer to an industrial tool than a social humanoid, which matches the first disclosed job.

The Deployment

Renault’s factory plan moved Calvin beyond partnership language. Auto Express reported the robot was working on the Douai factory supply line and would be joined by 350 additional units over the following 18 months. Other manufacturing coverage described Renault’s plan as more than 300 humanoid robots by the end of the following year, starting at ElectriCity in Douai.

Renault is not only testing the robot in a lab setting; the automaker is tying Calvin to a production task, a factory site and a multi-unit deployment plan. Public reporting does not disclose uptime, cycle time, maintenance load, worker handoff procedures or site-by-site rollout details.

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