Manufacturing
Volkswagen Sachsen Streamlines Robotics Deployment With Wandelbots NOVA and NVIDIA Isaac Sim
Wandelbots
Objective
Wandelbots accelerates robotics automation by combining its hardware-agnostic NOVA platform with the NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ framework. This helps manufacturers like Volkswagen Sachsen virtually program, simulate, and deploy robots in physically accurate environments before real-world deployment—drastically reducing complexity and deployment time while ensuring seamless real-world execution.
Customer
Volkswagen
Partner
Wandelbots
Use Case
Robotics
Products
NVIDIA Isaac
NVIDIA Omniverse
Key Business Impact
- Accelerated robot programming from weeks to minutes for complex manufacturing tasks at leading automotive facilities. Enhanced robot compatibility and ease of programming by enabling seamless integration with a wide range of robots and sensors, thanks to NOVA’s integration with Isaac Sim and OpenUSD.
- Seamless virtual-to-physical deployment by enabling robot applications to be developed, simulated, and validated digitally in physically accurate environments, then executed on the factory floor without code rewrites.
- Broadened developer access to robotics automation with NOVA’s agnostic architecture that allows developers from different backgrounds—not just robotics experts—to build and deploy automation solutions.
Manufacturing’s Automation Bottleneck
The automotive manufacturing sector faces a convergence of critical challenges—severe labor shortages, rising operational costs, volatile supply chains, and new pressures around energy and ESG compliance.
Traditionally, deploying robotics automation has been slow and heavily reliant on manually programming, limited to a handful of expert programmers and vendor-locked software.
For Volkswagen Sachsen, the challenge was clear: enable rapid, flexible robot deployment accessible to a broader group of engineers and adaptable to ever-changing production lines.
Volkswagen’s assembly process for roof liners presented a distinct technical and operational challenge. The roof liner, a large and flexible component that must be accurately installed inside a vehicle, is inherently difficult to automate due to its size, weight, and the need for precise manipulation. Volkswagen engineers relied on manually programming and training the robots—an iterative, resource-intensive process that took several weeks of adjustments to implement. The difficulty was compounded by the need to account for subtle changes in material properties, vehicle design variations, and tight tolerances in the assembly steps.
This meant that preparing robots for roof liner assembly not only involved programming exact movements, but also repeated trial and error on the shop floor to optimize gripper designs, robot paths, and process parameters. The inefficiency of this approach led to frequent downtime, increased operational expenses, and a bottleneck in scaling automation across other assembly stations.
Shrinking Manufacturing Timelines With a Simulation-First Approach
Wandelbots helped Volkswagen Sachsen tackle these hurdles with NOVA, the world’s first fully agnostic robot operating system. NOVA decouples robot hardware from its software, providing a unified abstraction layer compatible with all major robot brands.
Central to NOVA’s power is its integration with NVIDIA Isaac Sim—a reference robotics simulation framework built on NVIDIA Omniverse™ and OpenUSD. This standardized, interoperable foundation allows users to control and simulate a wide array of industrial robots regardless of the underlying, typically “black box” OEM controller, while ensuring seamless data exchange across the entire manufacturing pipeline. By serving as an abstraction layer, NOVA exposes a single, flexible interface.
This bypasses the challenge of interfacing with proprietary controller logic, making it possible to simulate, program, and test variations across different robot brands within Isaac Sim’s digital environment. Developers can build, simulate, and perfect workflows in physically accurate digital twins, simulating everything from robot behavior to sensor simulation before deploying to physical robots.
Wandelbots
This innovative approach was showcased in Volkswagen Sachsen’s Gläserne Manufaktur (Transparent Factory) in Dresden, where Wandelbots, working closely with Volkswagen engineers, explored new methods to accelerate the assembly of complex components like roof liners. While not yet deployed in serial production, this groundbreaking project demonstrates how simulation-first robotics can transform manufacturing, setting the stage for broader adoption across Volkswagen's global production network.
By adopting Wandelbots’ software-first platform and integrating with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform built on OpenUSD, Volkswagen Sachsen was able to move away from slow, manual approaches. The company can now iterate and test new scenarios in the virtual world, slashing development times from months to under a day for new robotic assembly solutions and reducing reliance on highly specialized robot programmers. The OpenUSD foundation ensures that digital twins and robotic configurations developed for one application can be seamlessly reused and modified for other production lines. This flexibility accelerates scalability across Volkswagen's manufacturing operations.
Beyond Volkswagen, partners such as Grid Dynamics and SmartRay use NOVA for use cases like automated welding inspection, baking in simulation-driven optimization, and physical experimentation without the usual time and cost penalties.
Transformation in Action
Wandelbots’ NOVA platform, exemplified by its successful deployment at Volkswagen Sachsen, delivered three standout outcomes:
- Radically Faster Development: Volkswagen Sachsen was able to train, test, and validate advanced robotics skills in the digital twin environment and transfer those skills to robots on the plant floor in a fraction of the time required by legacy methods.
- Operational Flexibility: The solution’s core-agnostic architecture lets Volkswagen quickly adapt automation to new production requirements, reducing the need for costly vendor-specific integrations or retraining.
- Expanded Talent Pool: By lowering the barrier to robot programming, NOVA enabled a more diverse group of engineers and developers to participate in the automation process. This accelerates innovation and reduces reliance on scarce robotics specialists.
Redefining Robotics for the Future of Manufacturing
By partnering with Wandelbots, manufacturers like Volkswagen are using a simulation-first workflow to unlock new levels of productivity, adaptability, and innovation in robotics. The software-defined, simulation-driven approach powered by NVIDIA technology is setting a new standard for accessible and rapid industrial automation.
"With NOVA, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and NVIDIA Omniverse, we’re bridging IT and operations for a software-defined factory. We can confidently build, test, and deploy robotics applications virtually, making advanced automation accessible and scalable for everyone—including Volkswagen, one of our leading partners.”
Christian Piechnick
Founder and CEO, Wandelbots
Learn more about robotics simulation for industrial use cases.