Renault Invests in Humanoid Robot Maker
Renault is investing in Wandercraft, a start-up company that has developed a humanoid robot for assembly line applications. Photo courtesy Wandercraft
PARIS—Renault Group is the latest automaker to express an interest in using humanoid robots for assembly line applications. The automaker has formed a strategic partnership with Wandercraft, a start-up company that has developed self-balancing exoskeletons and a bipedal machine called Calvin. The goal of the initiative is to develop a family of next-generation robots for use in Renault’s manufacturing operations.
"This partnership with Wandercraft is a forward-looking move,” says Thierry Charvet, chief industry and quality officer at Renault Group. “It will allow us to accelerate on automation and to develop robots for our specific auto industrial use, giving us the opportunity to concentrate our people on more value-adding tasks and alleviate operators from painful and non-ergonomics duties.
“It will drive productivity through the acceleration of production time and costs’ reduction,” explains Charvet. “In the end, it makes a lot of sense to combine Wandercraft’s unique expertise and technology in exoskeletons and robots, with [our] strong industrial capacity and design-to-cost know-how to bring the production of robots at scale.”
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