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Humanoids·3 min read

Agile ONE and the Krause Play: How Agile Robots is Betting Humanoids Will Fit the Factory

By Sophia Chen

On November 26, 2025, Agile Robots unveiled Agile ONE, an industrial humanoid with five-fingered hands and a layered AI stack, and announced it will buy thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering’s assets. The twin moves pair a dexterous prototype with decades of plant-engineering muscle at a moment when manufacturers are debating whether humanoids belong on the line.

Agile Robots says it doubled revenue year over year to roughly €200 million in 2024 and has deployed more than 20,000 robots across consumer electronics and automotive lines. The company plans to start manufacturing Agile ONE in Bavaria in early 2026 and expects the acquisition to add about 650 experts and 10 new locations, a push intended to accelerate integration at scale.

What Agile ONE actually brings to the line

Those are not small numbers. If the deal closes - Agile Robots and thyssenkrupp said it is subject to regulatory approval and should finish within months - the combined business will couple physical-robot R&D with heavy-duty system-integration experience. That matters because moving a humanoid from lab demo to continuous production requires plant engineering, supply-chain muscle, and safety certification as much as AI and hands-on dexterity.

Why the thyssenkrupp assets change the math

Agile ONE is engineered for manipulation tasks that traditional arms struggle with: five-fingered hands, tactile sensing, and a layered AI stack the company describes as combining low-level control, mid-level skill primitives, and high-level task planning. Agile Robots highlighted fine manipulation use cases such as operating power tools and switching fixtures - tasks that require adaptive grip and multi-contact control rather than blind repeatability.

The robot builds on technologies Agile Robots has gathered in recent years, including the 2023 acquisition of force- and power-limited-arm maker Franka Emika. That lineage matters because safety envelopes for human-proximate operations rely on torque-limited actuators and certified collision dynamics. Agile says it will manufacture Agile ONE in Bavaria in early 2026, which implies the system is at a late-prototype or low-rate initial production stage rather than a concept demo.

From cell to plant: integration, safety, and business cases

Why the thyssenkrupp assets change the math

Agile Robots announced it will acquire the assets of thyssenkrupp Automation Engineering, a unit with roots back to 1950 and decades of plant-engineering contracts in automotive. The deal, which Agile Robots expects to close in the next few months, brings roughly 650 experts, 10 European and North American locations, and project-execution experience the startup lacked at scale.

Who gains, who risks losing, and next hurdles

CEO Zhaopeng Chen framed the move bluntly: "Now is the right time to combine AI, robotics, and industrial expertise. Physical AI offers enormous productivity leaps to industrial producers." That is a corporate line, but the practical consequence is clear: systems integrators and line-builders are often the bottleneck for new hardware. Acquiring Krause Automation - the name Agile Robots plans to use post-close - compresses the time from robot prototype to certified, maintainable production cell.

From cell to plant: integration, safety, and business cases

Humanoids sit in a different problem space than cobots or articulated arms. Their advantage is adaptability; their weakness is complexity. A humanoid needs planning stacks, perception for unstructured scenes, and repeatable maintenance processes. Those are not just software issues; they require plant-level change control, spare-parts logistics, and safety assessments under ISO 15066 and functional safety standards.

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