Industrial Next says its stations retool in minutes; BMW will evaluate them

In short: Industrial Next told TechCrunch Disrupt on Oct. 13 that its self-contained robot stations, trained in high-fidelity simulation, can switch tasks in minutes rather than weeks. On stage it said BMW Group Technology Office will evaluate the system for manufacturing. That is a trial, not an order.

Who and what

• Founded in 2021 in San Francisco by Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, who met at Tesla. Pankau was a lead electrical architect at Tesla and later at Waymo. TechCrunch reports that Pan led Tesla's autonomous-factory work and later became a chief architect at Neolix; Pankau also recalled him at Momenta.
• The stations use what the company calls proprietary foundation models tying vision, task context and motion. New tasks come from simulation and demonstration, not hand-written robot programs.
• Pankau's claim for the simulator: it is close enough to real dynamics that the robots can do high-precision work "almost without seeing the parts at all." The product depends on closing the sim-to-real gap.

What is already on a line

Pankau said some stations already help build one of the world's most popular smartphones. He would not name the customer. The tasks he described: threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a small connector cap (jobs he said manufacturers had failed to automate for years) and a film-peeling station that strips protective film off camera modules and buttons at or above human speed. He said that station kept 100% accuracy after moving to a new phone model and a line it had never seen. TechCrunch is reporting his account; it is not an independent audit.

The company's stated goal is to assemble a whole car with no person touching the product.

Why it matters

Humanoid pilots draw more coverage. On a phone line, a dexterous physical AI station is judged by yield. The evaluation named with BMW's technology office can be checked later. The unnamed phone customer and the 100% figure cannot, until Industrial Next or the customer publishes them.

Pankau, on why they started the company after Tesla: "You had people who are really good at what they're doing (designing cars and designing self-driving systems), and then you had them effectively stumped at the factory looking at this equipment from the 1980s."