Apptronik is a humanoid-robotics company founded in 2016 out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. On August 23, 2023 it unveiled Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid robot intended for commercial work. Apollo stands about five feet eight inches tall, weighs roughly 160 pounds, and can lift up to about 55 pounds.
A central design goal for Apollo is mass manufacturability. Apptronik says it engineered the robot to be built at scale and made it supply-chain resilient by avoiding single-sourced core components, in contrast to one-off research robots. Apollo uses a force-control architecture so that it can operate safely around people, more like a collaborative robot than a fenced-off industrial arm, and it runs on swappable batteries that each provide about four hours of runtime, so a fresh pack keeps it working without long charging downtime.
The team draws on nearly a decade of experience building more than ten robots, including work on NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid. Apptronik targeted warehouse and manufacturing tasks first, such as moving cases and totes, with longer-term ambitions across construction, electronics, retail, delivery, and elder care.
For a general reader, Apptronik illustrates the practical hurdle that often decides which robotics companies survive: not just making one impressive robot, but designing one that can actually be built in volume and trusted to work next to humans.