A pilot programme at a Vodafone warehouse in Germany is showing how humanoid robots can enhance efficiency and improve safety.

Services company Accenture is working with Vodafone and SAP to demonstrate the use of humanoid robotics in warehouse environments, demonstrating how physical AI can enhance operational efficiency, improve safety and enable new approaches to workforce and business model design. The firms presented the work at last month’s Hannover Messe.

The initiative explores how humanoid robots could support the evolution of future workforce models and create revenue opportunities across industries.

The pilot programme was conducted at Vodafone Procure & Connect’s warehouse in Duisburg, Germany, where humanoid robots were deployed to operate alongside existing warehouse systems. The robot received inspection tasks through the SAP extended warehouse management system and autonomously carried out visual inspections across the facility.

The pilot included scenario tests in which the humanoid robot identified operational inefficiencies, safety risks and optimisation opportunities across warehouse processes. It detected misplaced or damaged products, assessed pallet stacking and weight distribution, highlighted unused storage space, and identified potential hazards such as obstacles in aisles or misaligned pallets. The robot reported its findings and recommendations directly into the SAP system, enabling real-time visibility and more informed operational decision-making.

SAP led the integration of the robots into the warehouse management system, while Accenture designed and deployed the robot intelligence and operational framework, drawing on its expertise in physical AI, robotics and digital-twin environments.

“Trained in digital twins and powered by physical AI, humanoid robots can reduce worker injuries and other warehouse safety incidents and lower overtime costs and the dependency on temporary labour,” said Christian Souche from Accenture (accenture.com). “Equally important, Vodafone Procure & Connect will gather valuable data and insights on robot deployment and performance as a basis for a future humanoid workforce business.”

The humanoid robots used in the pilot are powered by Accenture’s Robot Brain (www.accenture.com/us-en/services/emerging-technology/robotics), enabling them to interact naturally with human operators through voice, gestures and text.

“Through this pilot, we are exploring how humanoid robotics can improve efficiency, safety and operational visibility in our warehouse operations,” said Reinhard Stefan Plaza Bartsch, network logistics director at Vodafone Procure & Connect (procureconnect.vodafone.com). “It also gives us a clearer view of how these capabilities could scale across our supply chain and support future business models.”

The robots are trained in digital twins of warehouse environments, built on Accenture’s Physical AI Orchestrator, which uses Nvidia Omniverse libraries, the Mega Nvidia Omniverse Blueprint and the Nvidia Metropolis libraries and Blueprint for video search and summarisation for the deployment of visual AI agents, to go beyond single repetitive functions and learn new skills through imitation and reinforcement learning.

“At Vodafone Procure & Connect, we’re leveraging Joule, SAP’s AI execution fabric and interface for embodied AI, connecting robots to end-to-end processes and business logic and enabling them to know why, when and how to act,” said Lukasz Ostrowski, head of robotics at SAP (www.sap.com). “By grounding actions in trusted SAP data, we can automate health and safety incident reporting and real-time inventory validation to protect workers and strengthen compliance through consistent auditable workflows.”