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Hannover Messe 2026 (April 20–24) is where Mercedes-Benz turned its Apptronik partnership from a press release into footage. Apollo — the 5’8″, 160 lb, 55 lb-payload bipedal humanoid — is shown ferrying parts to assembly stations, delivering kit carts, and inspecting components inside a real Mercedes plant. Mercedes also said it’s expanding the deployment across its manufacturing footprint, which is the part the robotics crowd actually cared about.

The hardware

Apollo is a fully bipedal humanoid built for factory work, not a demo stage. 5’8″ (172 cm), 160 lb (73 kg), 55 lb (25 kg) payload, swappable battery packs so a shift doesn’t stop for charging. Cameras, depth sensors, and a force-controlled actuator stack designed by ex-NASA Valkyrie engineers. The frame is intentionally human-scale so it slots into existing workstations without redesigning the line. Apptronik just closed a $520M Series A-X in February (B Capital, Google, Mercedes co-leading) on a $5.3B post, taking total raised near $1B and putting commercial unit production on a 2026 timeline.

The API story

Apollo runs Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER on-board for vision-language reasoning, and Apptronik ships an Apollo Developer SDK to enterprise customers — ROS 2 plus a REST layer for skill injection. The pitch: an agent sends a natural-language task (“move bin 3 to station B”), Apollo’s VLM grounds it against the live scene and executes. Mercedes is the first public customer doing this on a production line; the Hannover demo is the proof that the SDK loop closes outside a lab.

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