Sanctuary AI says it trained an industrial robot to crush one of the hardest tasks to automate in automotive manufacturing.
The Canadian startup reported the breakthrough just days before the 2026 Automate Show in Chicago. The robotics firm shared footage of what looks like a Universal Robots dual-arm cobot setup doing wire harness and connector insertion at a Tier 1 automotive supplier.
Plugging the connectors into place over and over is simple for humans, but difficult for robots, which struggle with flexible objects. They’re ill-equipped to adapt as wires bend and twist while they’re locked in on insertion, while people can feel when the connector is not lined up and adjust on the fly.
According to Sanctuary AI, the system completed the job with a more than 99.5 percent success rate and a 2.5 second cycle time. That means it performed fast and reliable enough to match the unnamed customer’s real production line.
Vancouver-based Sanctuary AI, best known for its humanoid robot Phoenix, says it’s developing its Carbon AI robot brain to power industrial robots across form factors.