Embodied AI unveils Air, a wheeled humanoid that learns factory tasks from workers

What Embodied AI showed in Munich

Air moves on wheels rather than legs, which Embodied AI says gives it more stability on flat factory floors. Its arms are tendon-driven: the motors, gearboxes and electronics sit in the torso, and tendons pull lightweight arms that yield when they meet a person or an obstruction. The arm design grew out of co-founder and CEO Francesco Stella's doctoral research at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Embodied AI says Air typically moves from human demonstration to autonomous operation in about a month, depending on the task. The safety case rests on a published specification: the company says it designed Air under ISO/TS 15066:2016, the technical specification for collaborative industrial robot safety, with CE marking planned for 2027. Embodied AI said it has signed contracts with major manufacturers globally and is preparing for larger-scale production.

Learning by watching workers, not by teleoperation

Air starts under human control. It records what the operator does, and Embodied AI's software learns the movements until the robot can run the task on its own. Human operators stay available for unfamiliar situations, and skills learned by one robot can be transferred to others, according to Embodied AI.

The target is repetitive work that needs precise hand movements and changes often, which Embodied AI says is hard to automate with conventional industrial robots. Air's arms are built for that light handling rather than heavy industrial work.

The software is not new. Embodied AI says its AI is already in paid factory deployments running a separate two-armed industrial robot system.

98% reliability in a customer evaluation

In an evaluation run by a major consumer electronics manufacturer, Embodied AI reported 98% reliability on a cable-handling task, against the customer's 90% target. The company says four other startups in the same evaluation failed to meet the manufacturer's requirements. The evaluation used the two-armed industrial system, not Air.

"Hallucination of AI models is acceptable in the digital space because humans review, reject, or correct the output before acting on it," co-founder and CEO Francesco Stella said. "In robotics, however, incorrect actions have immediate and irreversible physical consequences."

What happens next

CE marking for Air is planned for 2027, and Embodied AI says it is preparing for larger-scale production. The company says Air is already being tested at major manufacturers.