Our Work

Apollo was developed from decades of experience building and developing a diverse range of robots, spanning from exoskeletons to upper body humanoid robots, biped mobility platforms, and unique robotic arms that lift more than they weigh. These robots, along with the insights and knowledge gained from building them, laid the foundation for Apollo, the world’s most capable humanoid robot.

Apptronik’s extensive work in robotics has enabled the expertise of achieving unmatched safety through forced control architectures with exoskeletons, improving payload while maintaining affordability through unique industrial robotic arms that lift more than they weigh, developing dynamic walking capabilities through numerous bi-pedal mobility platforms, and enabling fine grained manipulation via upper body humanoid robots. This development of different capabilities through different types of robots has led to Apollo.

Dr. Nick Paine
Co-founder and CTO

Astra

Apptronik’s latest upper body humanoid robot. It is designed to operate with and around humans. It has state-of-the-art actuation packed into a small form factor and can be put on any mobility platform.

QDA

Upper Body Control Testbed

QDA is Apptronik’s early upper body humanoid robot platform. QDA was a predecessor to Astra and helped enable Apptronik to develop the state-of-the-art actuation that can be seen in Astra.

QDH

QDB

Quick Development Biped

QDB is one of Apptronik’s early bi-pedal mobility platforms. QDB helped enable Apptronik develop functionality such as self-balancing, disturbance rejection, terrain robustness, and online controls.

Draco II & III

Draco is Apptronik’s first biped. It is a liquid cooled, high-performance bipedal platform.

The system has 10 DOFs and can be a platform for any humanoid system, with easy integration between systems because of the open access to low level control software and libraries for RT Linux/ROS integration.

Draco is designed for speed and power. It is efficient, and research on it was key to unlocking agile dynamic walking.

Scorpio

Mobile Manipulator

Scorpio is a unique mobile manipulator that uses patented gravity compensation technology to lift more than it weighs. Utilizing mechanical breakthroughs in spring technology, the electric-powered Scorpio arm passively compensates for gravity enabling low power consumption and is a small enough package to be mounted on any mobile platform.

Sagittarius

Agile Load Bearing Exoskeleton

Sagittarius is a lightweight, electrically actuated exoskeleton. This wearable robotic system offloads the operator, transferring forces to the ground directly. Sagittarius not only has actuated hips, but actuated knees and ankles that are liquid cooled. It has force sensitive foot interface for the operator’s feet and also a force sensitive torso interface.

Apex

Agile Load-Bearing Exoskeleton

The Apex exoskeleton is an optimized gravity offload device that provides ranges of motion (RoM) and degrees of freedom (DoF) uncommon in present load-bearing exoskeleton technology, reducing both physical and cognitive loads. Apex has a unique combination of low mass and high efficiency actuation, especially for high acceleration behaviors, as well as increased system reliability and robustness.

Valkyrie

The Apptronik team was selected to work on the NASA Valkyrie Robot for the DARPA Robotics Challenge during 2012-2013.

Valkyrie was a highly ambitious project, and Apptronik’s co-founders were selected to be part of the core team to work on the actuators and controls.

Apptronik's novel linear actuators are incorporated through out the Valkyrie robot, and lessons learned from this project helped to inform the latest generation of our technologies.

Valkyrie has 44 DOFs, and most of its joints have series elastic actuators.