From Lab to Factory Floor: KUKA Unveils ‘KUKA AMP’ at NVIDIA GTC 2026 as a Software Bridge to New Growth

The global economy’s?$30T labor market doesn’t yield to demos, it yields to systems that generalize under messy, real world production constraints. To help customers cross that gap, KUKA unveiled at NVIDIA GTC 2026 (March 16-19) in San Jose the KUKA Automation Management Platform (KUKA AMP), a new platform layer designed to take Physical AI from AI innovation to real-world production.

March 19, 2026

Showcasing KUKA AMP at NVIDIA GTC not only signals a major step in technological evolution but also highlights KUKA Group’s dedicated drive to shape and accelerate its growth trajectory.

As the boundaries between AI and physical automation disappear, one of the biggest questions in the industry is: Who will own the interface between AI models and the real world? KUKA AMP will be our foundational technology layer designed to orchestrate robots, fleets, work cells, and digital twins across factories, warehouses and commercial environments. It bridges the physical and digital worlds, enabling intent-based robotics, fleet intelligence, and scalable AI-driven automation at unprecedented speed.

Melonee Wise, Chief Software & AI Product Officer

KUKA AMP will lay the base for the future of automation across the KUKA Group portfolio. The platform builds on KUKA’s longstanding robotics expertise combined with a next-generation software and AI stack designed for industrial use.

Artificial intelligence moves onto the factory floors

Industrial robots have mastered repeatability, executing the same motion with precision. But as conditions change, adapting often demands additional configuration time, scarce expertise and fragmented tooling. “While ‘AI-first robotics’ can impress in laboratory settings, it often struggles to deliver consistent results in real-world production, where models must understand and generalize each environment and its evolution to achieve the repeatable precision industry demands. KUKA AMP addresses this challenge by standardizing how AI reasons, decides, and acts in the physical world”, says Marc Fleischmann, Chief Software & AI Officer at KUKA Group. KUKA AMP will standardize semantics, actions, and data across assets – making automation easier, scalable, predictable, and safe.

KUKA AMP: A platform built to generalize Physical AI

At the heart of KUKA AMP is a scalable platform layer that sits between AI agents and physical hardware. It provides three foundational capabilities that translate high level goals into safe, repeatable outcomes on real machines:

Semantics (the “so what”) – Intent-based operations with a shared semantic context that abstracts the real world into machine-understandable meaning. This lets AI reason about outcomes—rather than hardcoded device specifics.
Actions (the “how”) – A shared control interface with standardized action primitives so AI agents can safely execute intent consistently across different robots, AMRs, work cells and equipment.
Data (the “what”) – A structured, consistent telemetry pool that captures state and operational signals to drive continuous learning and closed loop optimization.

In operation, KUKA AMP will abstract, observe, act, repeat and predict in a closed loop, optimizing across the real environment and its embedded digital twin. This yields a virtuous cycle where every mission, task and exception improves the next. KUKA AMP is built as an open, composable API platform to orchestrate all elements of automation: from AMRs and industrial robots to work cells, software tools and digital services. All within one environment. It provides a single pane of glass from Day-0 (design & simulation) to Day-N (deployment, monitoring, optimization and continuous learning).

KUKA AMP ist als offene, modular aufgebaute API-Plattform konzipiert.

A cornerstone of KUKA’s technological transformation

The unveiling of KUKA AMP at NVIDIA GTC marks a pivotal phase of technological transformation and reflects the company’s dedicated commitment to driving future growth. “We are actively shaping this next phase of automation. Building on decades of industrial expertise and a strong robotics and solutions heritage, we are seamlessly adding to deterministic automation (Automation 1.0) AI-first, intent-based automation (Automation 2.0)”, says Christoph Schell, CEO of KUKA Group.

Proven hardware capabilities within KUKA Robotics with more than 550.000 robots installed globally, having increased global market share and even moved to top two manufacturers worldwide. In China – the world’s largest robotics market – KUKA is in the TOP 3 and has a clear ambition to move into a leading market position during 2026. KUKA Group is extended through intelligent, software?defined solutions, enriched by AI, orchestration, and digital layers. At the heart of this approach is the KUKA Automation Management Platform (AMP) bridging to new growth markets.

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