Schaeffler has entered a technology partnership with German robotics and physical AI company Wandelbots to develop the Wandelbots NOVA open platform for industrial and humanoid robots. Schaeffler says the platform will help reduce the life cycle costs of automation by "up to 40 percent," in both new and existing manufacturing environments.
The agreement covers development, validation, and global scaling of robotics applications. The partners aim to make NOVA a standard at Schaeffler and, in time, make it available to all of the company's plants worldwide. The platform will connect different robot systems. A solution tested in one application can then move to other applications and locations.
Virtual testing will run on NVIDIA's Omniverse and Isaac Sim technologies. Manufacturing processes and robot tasks can be simulated and validated digitally before they reach the production floor. For automation engineers, that means commissioning work shifts into simulation first, and a validated robot application becomes something to transfer between sites rather than rebuild at each one.
Dr. Jochen Schröder, Chief Operating Officer of Schaeffler AG, said: "If you want to shape the manufacturing of the future, you have to rethink automation." Christian Piechnick, CEO and co-founder of Wandelbots, said his company has "sufficiently demonstrated the technical feasibility" of physical AI over the last 12 months. "Now we have to ensure that skills can be developed efficiently, transferred to different systems, and deployed reliably in actual manufacturing settings," he said.
NOVA will also include a skill store that bundles applications, models, and technical knowledge. Schaeffler plans to use it to capture skills from individual projects, apply them independent of the robot system, and scale them to other plants. The company also plans to make those skills available externally in the future.
