Schaeffler taps Wandelbots NOVA to cut automation costs up to 40%

The partnership builds on Wandelbots' claim that it has spent the last 12 months demonstrating the technical feasibility of physical AI. CEO Christian Piechnick framed the next step as making skills develop efficiently, transfer across systems, and deploy reliably in real manufacturing settings — which is where Schaeffler's industrial application expertise comes in.

Schaeffler's side of the bargain is scale and standardization. The partners aim to establish NOVA as a standard at Schaeffler, where it would support designing applications, digitally testing them, and deploying them across plants. A skill store bundling applications, models and technical knowledge is meant to let Schaeffler capture skills from individual projects and use them system-independently.

The virtual testing layer relies on Nvidia's Omniverse and Isaac Sim, allowing processes and robot tasks to be simulated and validated before real-world rollout. COO Dr Jochen Schröder described the goal as taking physical AI "straight from theory to industrial practice," while Piechnick said the cooperation combines an open technology platform with industrial application expertise to move applications from development to practice faster.