Audi Tests Humanoid Robots for Parts Sequencing at Ingolstadt

Audi workers make roughly 1 million picks a day at the Ingolstadt plant to get the right parts to the right workstation in the right order — and the automaker now wants humanoid robots to take over that sequencing, making it faster, more accurate and cheaper.

The German OEM has begun testing two-armed, wheeled humanoids in a production lab at Ingolstadt, its home assembly site. The robots pick parts from material containers and place them in the correct sequence for final assembly. Audi supply chain experts contributed sequencing expertise and defined the operational requirements for testing the humanoids under real-world conditions.

Audi didn't build the technology alone. Three suppliers back the project:

• Agile Robots (Munich-based start-up) supplied the humanoid robots, each with two arms and a wheeled base
• NVIDIA supplied the artificial intelligence software
• Dassault Systèmes supplied simulation software for robot programming

What does this change for plant logistics?

Not production itself — not yet. The trial targets smart intralogistics, the flow of materials inside the plant rather than assembly-line work. Two of the most persistent automation gaps in automotive logistics are handling semi-rigid parts and picking unsorted components from containers. Agile Robots designed its mobile humanoids to address both: dual-arm manipulation handles large and flexible parts, while AI-powered perception lets the robot identify, grasp and place components even when stored in mixed containers or presented in varying positions and packaging.

The humanoids work at human height. That matters. They slot into Audi's existing plant environment without retrofit workstations.

Virtual twin before the shop floor

Before any humanoid deploys in Audi's smart intralogistics environment, engineers are building a virtual twin of the logistics setup using Dassault's Delmia software. Feasibility, timings, ergonomics and safety for each robot task will be validated inside the virtual twin on Dassault's 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which draws on Dassault's industry world models and NVIDIA's Omniverse libraries.

"The breakthrough is not simply bringing humanoid robots into the factory. It is being able to engineer and validate their mission and role before they ever enter it physically," said Philippe Laufer, executive vice president of 3DS global brands at Dassault Systèmes. With virtual twins, he said, engineers can experiment with feasibility, timing, ergonomics and safety virtually, "reducing work [from] months to days."

Agile Robots' track record gives the trial some credibility. The Munich company has shipped more than 20,000 humanoids, six-axis robots and autonomous mobile robots to customers worldwide.

"Agile Robots is driving industries forward with physical AI," said Zhaopeng Chen, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Agile Robots. "Working with Audi, we show how our mobile humanoids can perform high-value, critical tasks that were previously impossible to automate."

What to watch next

This is a lab trial, not a confirmed production deployment. The marker to track: whether humanoids move from the Ingolstadt production lab into the plant's live intralogistics environment after virtual-twin validation wraps. Watch for cycle-time and pick-accuracy figures from Audi — the automaker hasn't released them yet — and for any timeline on scaling the trial beyond Ingolstadt.