Hexagon Unveils AEON: A Humanoid Robot to Address Global Labor Shortages in Industry
As industries worldwide grapple with a labor shortage that has left over 50 million positions unfilled, Hexagon — a global leader in digital reality and precision measurement technologies — is stepping in with a high-tech solution: humanoid robotics.
At the Hexagon LIVE Global conference, the company introduced AEON, a cutting-edge humanoid robot developed in partnership with NVIDIA. AEON is designed to support a wide array of industrial tasks, offering assistance in sectors ranging from manufacturing and logistics to aerospace and transportation.
Industrial environments often require skilled labor to handle tasks prone to human error — such as operating high-precision scanners for reality capture, a process that involves collecting detailed data to create digital simulations of real-world spaces. AEON aims to not only support such operations but also enhance them through automation and precision.
AEON’s capabilities include:
- Reality Capture: Automating the scanning and mapping of industrial assets and environments to create detailed 3D models. These models feed into Hexagon’s Digital Reality (HxDR) platform and power applications like Reality Cloud Studio (RCS) for visualization and collaboration.
- Manipulation Tasks: Performing tasks like sorting, moving, and handling components in manufacturing and logistics operations.
- Part Inspection: Identifying defects or ensuring that components meet required specifications through automated analysis.
- Industrial Operations: Taking on complex technical tasks, including machine operation, teleoperation, and the use of high-end scanners for detailed part analysis.
The age of general-purpose robotics has arrived, driven by advances in simulation and physical AI,” said Deepu Talla, Vice President of Robotics and Edge AI at NVIDIA. “Hexagon’s AEON humanoid represents a major step forward, powered by NVIDIA’s three-computer robotics platform, and is poised to solve critical workforce challenges across multiple industries.”
With AEON, Hexagon envisions a future where humanoid robots become essential partners on the factory floor — accelerating productivity, improving accuracy, and helping fill the global labor gap.
Using NVIDIA’s Three Computers to Develop AEON
To build AEON, Hexagon used NVIDIA’s three computers for developing and deploying physical AI systems. They include AI supercomputers to train and fine-tune powerful foundation models; the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, running on NVIDIA OVX servers, for testing and optimizing these models in simulation environments using real and physically based synthetic data; and NVIDIA IGX Thor robotic computers to run the models.
Hexagon is exploring using NVIDIA accelerated computing to post-train the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.5 open foundation model to improve robot reasoning and policies, and tapping Isaac GR00T-Mimic to generate vast amounts of synthetic motion data from a few human demonstrations.
AEON learns many of its skills through simulations powered by the NVIDIA Isaac platform. Hexagon uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a reference robotic simulation application built on Omniverse, to simulate complex robot actions like navigation, locomotion and manipulation. These skills are then refined using reinforcement learning in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, an open-source framework for robot learning.