Apptronik unveils Apollo 2 and a flagship data collection and training facility

Apptronik offers a bipedal configuration for movement through spaces built for people, while a wheeled base offers stability and efficiency for high-throughput environments. | Source: Apptronik

Apptronik yesterday made two major announcements. First, the company launched Apollo 2, its updated humanoid robot. Second, it opened its newly expanded Robot Park, its flagship data collection and training facility for humanoid robots in Austin, Texas.

Apollo 2 comes in both bipedal and wheeled-base configurations. Apptronik said it designed the robot to learn real-world work through large-scale data collection. It enables the company to gather diverse data across a wide range of tasks and environments.

As part of Apptronik’s research partnership with Google DeepMind , the data Apollo 2 collects helps to advance Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind’s foundation models for robotics.

The facility in Austin joins a growing number of Apptronik Robot Parks at customer and partner sites worldwide. The company claimed that the facility, Apollo 2, and its research partnership form an integrated system for rapidly developing and deploying humanoid robot intelligence.

“The industry has spent years showing what robots can do in demos. We’re focused on what they can do every day on the job,” stated Jeff Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of Apptronik. “What we’re building is a continuous learning loop with the Google DeepMind Robotics team: robots working, collecting data, and improving with every cycle, in real environments, on real tasks.”

“Robot Park enables the data collection that is fuel for that, and Apollo 2 is the machine that makes it possible,” he added. “That’s how you move from early prototypes to real, deployable humanoid robots.”

Apptronik said Apollo is based on nearly a decade of development on 15 previous robots, including NASA’s Valkyrie. The company started out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin and has nearly 300 employees. Earlier this year, it raised $520 million in funding, bringing its total capital raised to nearly $1 billion.

Apollo 2 is a modular AI -powered humanoid that has been the workhorse behind Robot Park for more than a year. The robot enables continuous learning through deployment across Robot Park locations and at customer and partner sites.

By offering Apollo in modular configurations, Apptronik said it can optimize data collection across a variety of operational environments. The company designed the wheeled-base to conform with existing safety standards for industrial mobile robots . This allows it to fit easily into existing customer operations, it said.