KUKA AMP Goes Live in North America Automotive Production
With the combination of proven industrial automation and AI-driven decision-making, KUKA AMP enables manufacturers to increase operational flexibility, enhance productivity, and unlock greater value from production data.
Shelby Township, Mich., July 29, 2026- KUKA has reached a significant milestone in industrial automation with the successful deployment of KUKA AMP (Automation Management Platform) at the KUKA Toledo Production Operations (KTPO), one of North America’s major automotive manufacturing facilities located in Ohio. The open orchestration platform is now live and actively supporting production operations, connecting existing automation infrastructure with next-generation AI-powered technologies.
With the combination of proven industrial automation and AI-driven decision-making, KUKA AMP enables manufacturers to increase operational flexibility, enhance productivity, and unlock greater value from production data.
KTPO is a wholly owned subsidiary of KUKA Systems North America LLC. The 335,000-square-foot facility manufactures more than 300 vehicle bodies per day, approximately one every two minutes. Cumulatively, KTPO has produced over two million vehicle bodies, generating vast amounts of production data. Since 2006, KTPO has produced the body-in-white for every Jeep® Wrangler sold worldwide and, since 2019, for the Jeep® Gladiator. The highly automated facility combines KUKA’s expertise in welding, joining technologies, and systems integration, operating with 285 robots and more than 60,000 connected devices across the production environment.
“With the launch of AMP, manufacturing is entering a new era,” said Marc Fleischmann, Chief Software and AI Officer of the KUKA Group. “Traditional automation is expanding and transforming, and the future lies in the combination of precision and reliability of proven industrial automation with the capabilities of AI-powered systems. KUKA AMP provides the foundation for that next step.”
The AMP implementation represents another step in KUKA’s strategy to bring AI out of pilot environments and into real-world manufacturing at scale. The United States is a significant market for KUKA and home to more than 3,400 employees across engineering, manufacturing, software development, systems integration, and customer support functions. KUKA has been operating the KTPO since 2006.
According to Fleischmann, Physical AI will drive the next major leap forward into a new generation of intelligent technologies that enable machines and robots to better understand their environment, learn continuously from operational data, and make increasingly informed decisions in real time. Factories generate enormous amounts of data, and until now, much of this information remains dormant in isolated systems. KUKA AMP helps customers transform this data into actionable insights, allowing automation systems to better understand production processes, coordinate activities across workflows, and continuously improve performance.
“KUKA AMP creates a scalable foundation for Physical AI,” said Fleischmann. “It provides an automation platform that lets customers integrate their own AI models and generalize them in production with a shared context layer. By continuously collecting and analyzing operational data, it creates a closed-loop system that can improve performance over time and helps organizations scale intelligent automation.”
The KTPO facility offers an ideal environment for demonstrating how established industrial automation can be enhanced through AI-driven technologies. “Testing the alpha version of KUKA AMP at KTPO is an important step forward. KTPO is a familiar environment for us, so we can focus on evaluating the platform under realistic conditions and accelerate improvements that will help deliver the best possible experience for our users,” said Fleischmann.
The goal is to help manufacturers drive higher efficiency through more comprehensive automation without replacing existing assets. By connecting mobile robots, machines, software systems, and data sources, KUKA AMP enables companies to automate more complex processes, increase operational flexibility, reduce changeover times, and unlock greater value from existing factory data.
“Physical AI should not be viewed as a disruption, but as the next evolution of industrial automation,” Fleischmann added. “Manufacturers want a practical path forward that builds on decades of investment. KUKA AMP is being developed in the United States and provides that path by connecting and gradually augmenting today’s factory with the autonomous factory of tomorrow.”
All KUKA automation solutions are backed by the company’s expert service and support for training, complete system engineering and simulation, readily available spare parts, robot refurbishment, and more, all of which are easily accessible through the my.KUKA.com site.
KUKA
KUKA is an international automation group with sales of around EUR 3.7 billion and approximately 15,000 employees. As one of the world’s leading suppliers of intelligent, resource-saving automation solutions, KUKA offers industrial robots, autonomous mobile robots (AMR) including controllers, software, and cloud-based digital services, as well as fully networked production systems for various industries – primarily for markets such as automotive with a focus on e-mobility & battery, electronics, metal & plastic, consumer goods, food, e-commerce, retail, and healthcare. The company is headquartered in Augsburg, Germany.