“We want to be one of the three great roboticists in the world”: how the French nugget Wandercraft intends to challenge the Chinese and American giants

A robot capable of carrying a 25-kilo box, working on an assembly line and, tomorrow, helping an elderly person get out of their chair. This is Wandercraft’s bet. The French company, known for its medical exoskeletons, is now tackling the global market for industrial humanoid robots. With the aim of not being left behind by the Chinese and American giants, who are investing massively in this new generation of machines.

His new humanoid is called Calvin, in homage to Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist imagined by Isaac Asimov. With this literary reference as a standard, Wandercraft wants to design robots capable of working in real conditions, rather than shining in spectacular demonstrations. “We want to be one of the three great roboticists in the world,” assures Jean-Louis Constanza, co-founder of the company in 2012.

To keep up, Wandercraft has a major asset: Renault, its minority shareholder, industrial partner and first customer. The manufacturer must enable it to take the step of large-scale production, relying on methods from the automobile industry to reduce costs and make manufacturing more reliable. An alliance that Jean-Louis Constanza considers particularly successful, without fearing for the independence of his company.

Jean-Louis Constanza, co-founder of the company in 2012.

Industrial sovereignty constitutes another pillar of its strategy. Wandercraft claims more than 60% of added value produced in France and wants to repatriate its critical components to France and Europe. Not all are available on the continent: some engines come from the United States, other elements from Germany or Spain. But the objective is clear: to prevent a disruption in supply from compromising production.

Reduce dependence on foreign suppliers

Faced with Asian, particularly Chinese, and American competitors, Wandercraft plays a different role. For Constanza, the prowess of the humanoid robots presented in video does not always prove their ability to work autonomously. In a factory, performance is measured less by the ability to perform a somersault than by the ability to repeat a task without error, for a whole day. Its teams combine artificial intelligence and deterministic algorithms, based on precise rules, in order to obtain success rates compatible with industrial requirements.

They also train machines in virtual environments using a proprietary simulator, supplemented for certain applications by Nvidia tools. On the other hand, it seeks to limit on-board computing power, to control costs and reduce its dependence on the most recent components.

This approach also responds to a strategic issue. If robots become essential to factories, hospitals and establishments welcoming the elderly, their dependence on foreign suppliers could weaken entire sectors. Same concern for data collected on industrial sites. Wandercraft does not own its customers' data and retains the possibility of reusing certain lessons to improve its software.

Machine-translated from French