"As we prepare for the potential separation from Hexagon AB, Octave will be a powerful identity to reflect the significant growth opportunity,” said Mattias Stenberg, president of Hexagon’s asset lifecycle intelligence and safety, infrastructure and geospatial divisions who wil be Octave CEO. “As a separate, standalone company, Octave will have the depth, scale and expertise necessary to capitalize on software and services opportunities across the industrial and public sector spaces and deliver intelligence at scale."

Stenberg said the new firm's leadership team will remain at Hexagon's current Hunstville, Ala., location.

Henning Sandfort, president of Hexagon's Geosystems division who remains in that role, said the parent company's focus continues to be on measurement technologies.

To that end, Arnaud Robert, president of Hexagon Robotics, introduced the company's first humanoid-form robot, Aeon, at the Las Vegas event.

The robot, whose use cases include reality capture for construction, stands about 4 ft tall, has two full AI computers, NVIDIA graphics processing units, two cameras in the head alone and 22 spatial sensors. While Boston Dynamics assisted in its design, Aeon is a bipedal robot with wheels for feet that it can use for either rolling or walking. The robot's hands developed from designs for dexterous prosthetic hands for humans who have had amputations. Microsoft provided cloud and edge computing and Maxon-provided precision measurement and actuators. 

While many robots have tried to solve the construction reality capture problem—long done inconsistently by humans — Hexagon believes its humanoid is an improvement over robot dogs or drones because it has two batteries and the ability to swap out its own battery packs without human intervention.  

Robert said Aeon's ability to learn will also help it improve in performing construction tasks.

"The pace of innovation in physical AI is getting better," he said. "Foundational models teach a robot how to reason and learn."