Inside The European Factory Where Robots Are Building Robots
I toured the Munich factory where Agile Robots is building robots … largely with other robots. Agile Robots Zhaopeng Chen read Isaac Asimov science fiction as a kid, and he never really stopped. Maybe thats why the Agile Robots new humanoid robot Agile One looks vaguely like the robots in the Will Smith I, Robot movie, based on the Asimov book of the same name. “Every single person on the planet will get a personal robot,” the founder and CEO of Agile Robots told me in Munich last week. “This is not going to be very far away. Its not in days, but in years, decades, it will be there.” That‘s a very big number — eight billion robots, give or take — from a man who has spent his career making very small ones. Chen got his PhD building robotic hands at the German Aerospace Center, spun Agile Robots out of DLR (Germany’s national aerospace and space research agency that also does robotics) in 2018, and has since put more than 20,000 automation systems into factories and warehouses worldwide. Reality check: as of today, almost nothing Agile Robots sells is a personal robot. The company sells arms, grippers, mobile robotic transport platforms, automation cells,









