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Apptronik · edge

Verified 2w ago

Apptronik Apollo

NASA-Valkyrie-derived industrial humanoid: hot-swap battery, force-control architecture, Mercedes-Benz pilot.

Stylized line drawing of the Apptronik Apollo

Industrial humanoid built on a decade of NASA Valkyrie heritage and ten prior in-house robots. Force-control architecture lets it work alongside humans without facility redesign. Mercedes-Benz pilot agreement since March 2024; Apollo 2 followed in June 2026.

Specs

height
173 cm
weight
73 kg
dof
(not published)
compute
onboard (not disclosed)
battery
hot-swappable
runtime
~4 hours per pack
payload
25 kg
deployment
pilot / data collection (Mercedes-Benz, GXO)

Apollo is Apptronik's industrial humanoid — the design lineage runs through ten in-house generations and ten years of work on NASA's Valkyrie program before Apollo. The hot-swappable battery pack architecture is the deployment-tell: it's built around the assumption that a single charge cycle is shorter than a shift, and the operator is expected to swap rather than wait.

The Mercedes-Benz commercial agreement announced in March 2024 is the marquee pilot: Apollo delivers assembly kits to the line while inspecting components, in Mercedes-Benz facilities the agreement did not name. Reuters reported in March 2025 that Mercedes had taken a stake in Apptronik and was testing a handful of robots at its Digital Factory Campus in Berlin-Marienfelde and in Kecskemét, Hungary. In June 2026 Apptronik unveiled Apollo 2, in bipedal and wheeled versions, as a data-collection and training platform deployed at Google DeepMind and at customers including Mercedes-Benz and GXO; it bills the next model, Apollo 3, as its commercial product.

Honest caveat: Apptronik has not published degrees of freedom, walking speed, or onboard compute. The height, weight, payload, and runtime above are its published figures for the original Apollo, from the 2023 unveiling release; the Apollo 2 product page publishes none of them.

Primary sources: Apptronik — Apollo unveiling (2023), Apptronik — Apollo 2, PR Newswire — Apptronik + Mercedes-Benz commercial agreement (March 2024).