Agile ONE Starts Production Near Munich, Hand First
Agile Robots opened the doors at its Munich HQ and then bused journalists out to Fürstenfeldbruck, where Agile ONE is now in first production. The humanoid is a 174 cm, 69 kg biped rated at 2.0 m/s and a 20 kg payload. That is the machine, not the TAM slide.
The company is a 2018 DLR spin-off. Its about page lists production in Munich, Kaufbeuren, China, and India, plus subsidiaries Franka Robotics, idealworks, BÄR Automation, and Krause Automation. Humanoids Daily says the installed base is more than 20,000 robotic systems worldwide. Agile ONE is the new biped sitting on top of that stack.
A 21-DoF hand, not a speech
The hardware detail worth keeping is the Agile Hand: 1.5 kg, five modular fingers, 21 joints / 21 DoF, joint speed up to 360°/s, torque and position sensing in every actuated joint. That is a DLR-hand lineage, not a two-jaw afterthought.
On the dual-arm side, Humanoids Daily cites industrial evals from Agile’s Google DeepMind partnership:
- 89.6% success on precision part insertion (FR3 Duo)
- 78.9% on diverse tool kitting
- 74% on general pick-and-place
Those numbers are insertion and kitting, not a humanoid shift. Do not mix them up. They are still the shop-floor receipts the company is willing to put next to the humanoid.
CEO Zhaopeng Chen, speaking at the event, told Reuters (as quoted by Humanoids Daily) he does not buy “magic” zero-shot factory intelligence:
“I’m a scientist. I believe in logic and science. So I don’t believe magic—like you get a robot so smart and then it automatically will be working the factories.”
He also said the humanoid market could eventually be “ten times bigger” than cars. That is a forecast, not a PO. The production line is the fact.
A Human’s Take
A European humanoid that starts as a hand and a factory, not a dance reel, is the version I will actually watch. 21 DoF with joint torque in every finger is a real product choice. 89.6% insertion on a dual-arm cell is a different product. The gap between those two is the whole job. If Agile ONE’s first units only walk the lab while FR3 Duo does the insertions, say so. If the biped starts taking those cycles, that is the story.