1 week Ago
At a time when autonomous humanoid robots from multiple companies are being hyped by the richest and most powerful people on the planet, there’s only one that’s actually got a job. Like a real, 9-to-5, paying gig. And that’s Digit by Agility Robotics, says CEO Peggy Johnson.
“We are the only out there getting paid to do work,” she told me yesterday at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. “There is a lot of hype out there but we’re trying to stay very grounded, and we are the only humanoid out there right taking actual work.” There’s no shortage of competitors: In spite of the well-funded and luminary-studded list of rivals for leadership in autonomous humanoid robots, Johnson is confident in Agility Robotics ability to win.
It helps that Digit is real, not driven by humanoid drone pilots as we’ve seen from Tesla, and actually taking home paychecks from real customers. It also helps that Agility just announced a minority investment, partnership, and new customer relationship with multi-billion dollar German mobility manufacturer Schaeffler AG. Financial details were not announced, but new money into Agility Robotics has to be welcome as the thermostat has been cranked up in the global race to manufacture competent robotic laborers.
“Schaeffler will integrate this technology into our operations and see the potential to deploy a significant number of humanoids in our global network of 100 plants by 2030,” Andreas Schick, COO of Schaeffler AG, said in a statement announcing the investment. “We look forward to the collaboration with Agility Robotics which will accelerate our activities in this field.” Schaeffler’s big: 120,000 employees, annual revenues in the $15 billion range, hundreds of products, mostly for the automotive industry.
So this is a consequential move for Agility Robotics, and it comes at a critical time for the company. Agility has invested heavily in RoboFab, its production facility in Salem, Oregon. Next-generation Digit models are rolling off the production line there, Johnson says, and in the near future, Digits will be helping to make Digits.
That will start in shipping and logistics, but Agility does intend to involve its robotic product in the production process as well at some point. Which of course brings us closer to the Von Neumann era of self-replicating machines that can construct copies of themselves autonomously. At which point, presumably, we can solve all of our labor shortage problems.
“The number of open jobs in these areas is enormous,” says Johnson, referring to manufacturing and logistics. “Our love of instant delivery has caused this to snowball ..
. it’s at 1.1 million now and still accelerating.
” (That’s not even including whether president-elect Donald Trump makes good on election promises and deports potentially millions of undocumented people from the United States. Most of those are workers who pick produce, manufacture goods, ship packages, and more.) The current Digit works a regular eight-hour shift and is roughly equivalent to what I’m calling one MHP, or Modern Human Power.
While they do go and charge themselves without human help, the work-to-charge ratio is not amazing at roughly 4:1 (four minutes of work to every one minute of charge). Next generation Digits will benefit from Agility’s exclusive access to new battery technologies that will boost that ratio all the way to 10:1, CTO Pras Velagapudi told me. Even so, the current generation of Digits pay for themselves in two years, Johnson says.
(Which, though the company doesn’t disclose pricing, suggests Digit currently costs something like $150,000, if you assume that most logistics workers make around $35,00 to $50,000 per year, and that company costs to employ people are typically twice their annual wage.) One of the reason why Digit is out there working in the real world is Agility Robotics’ keep-it-simple-stupid approach to robotics. Since half the complexity of robots is in the hands and fingers , Digit doesn’t have fingers.
“You don’t actually need five fingers,” says Johnson. “Fingers are very fragile. A lot of things can go wrong.
” Instead, Digit has flat, spatulate grippers, which easily fit between boxes and grasp what’s needed. Coming soon in the next-generation Digit is “swappable end effects,” a fancy term for Digit being able to take its “hands” off and replace them with whatever tool or appendage or manipulator is right for the next job. (Try that with your human workforce, OSHA.
) Also coming: multiple AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. The company is agnostic about which is and will be the best, but intends that next-generation Digits will not only be able to work with people safely but also be able to take non-specific and unprogrammed action. Digit has already demonstrated greater intelligence than one of its engineers.
Asked to sort trash and recyclables, but given no instructions on which is which, Digit put bubble wrap into the trash. An engineer thought Digit made a mistake in not putting the bubble wrap into the plastic recycling bin, but in fact bubble wrap is not recyclable, Johnson told me. Which speaks to humans’ evolving roles as autonomous humanoid robots start entering the workforce en masse over the next decade.
“We envision lots of robots ...
different robots for different things,” Johnson says. “As they do that, the human worker becomes a digital worker.” One customer has already posted a job for Fleet Manager, Robots, and Agility plans to release the ability for Digit to safely interact with human co-workers in the same unbounded physical space soon.
They call it “cooperative safety,” and will be demonstrating it next year. Hopefully all human workers will be able to find new, higher value and higher reward work if they are displaced. If not, a Universal Basic Income scheme will go from an interesting idea to a fundamental social requirement.
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