Humanoid AI Pursues Certified Wheeled Robots to Capture European Industrial Market
UK-based Humanoid AI is prioritizing wheeled robotic platforms over bipedal models to secure faster industrial certification and capture enterprise contracts without relying on massive venture capital rounds.
UK-based Humanoid AI is directing 90 percent of its engineering resources toward a wheeled mobile manipulator, the HMND 01, to accelerate industrial deployment. The 130-person startup has already secured deployment agreements with major industrial players including Schaeffler, Bosch, and Siemens.
This pragmatic hardware choice bypasses the regulatory bottlenecks currently stalling bipedal robotics. Chief Product Officer Sotirios Stasinopoulos noted that no mature ISO standard exists for bipedal industrial frameworks due to inherent fall risks.
Conversely, the wheeled platform can achieve CE certification by combining existing autonomous mobile robot and collaborative robot standards. The company targets a fully certified product ready for the market by late 2027.
By avoiding the billion-dollar venture capital burn rate of American and Chinese rivals, Humanoid AI is leveraging a distinct second-mover advantage. The team includes over 50 veterans from firms like Boston Dynamics and 1X, allowing the startup to bypass costly early-stage missteps.
The robots currently operate at roughly 80 percent of human speed and success rates on core tasks, up from 60 percent. Stasinopoulos expects performance to eventually exceed human benchmarks through reinforcement learning, where overnight autonomous testing continuously retrains a shared base model.
This physical AI is managed through a strict four-layer software stack. An agentic fleet coordinator assigns tasks, while off-the-shelf vision-language models like Google’s Gemini break them into deterministic workflows executed by proprietary action models.
Strategic Supply Chains
The company’s operational strategy also directly addresses European supply chain sovereignty. Humanoid AI plans to manufacture locally for European clients and maintain a "China plus one" supply chain to mitigate geopolitical risks.
Critical components are secured through strategic partnerships rather than open market purchases. The robot's actuators are co-designed with Schaeffler, and its compute infrastructure runs on Nvidia hardware.
This targeted, capital-efficient approach aims to deliver a flexible, multi-task robotic workforce. The company is explicitly avoiding single-purpose automation in favor of systems that can stock shelves, feed machines, and reorganize inventory within a single duty cycle.
