Exploring the Loneliness of Robotic Humanoids
Perhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone at the supply chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X, and Apptronik. This time last year at Modex (the Chicago version of the conference), Digit had something of an industrial automation coming-out party. A line of the bipedal robots were moving totes to a nearby conveyor belt at select times throughout the week.
This week in Atlanta, a rotating cast of eight Digits are working each day from show opening to close. This time, however, the blue and silver robots are doing something a bit different. The demos showcase lineside replenishment and tote retrieval with a flow rack designed for automotive manufacturing. Agility tells TechCrunch that it is currently working with automotive customers — though it has yet to release any names.
Famously, Ford was among Agility’s first proponents, announcing a partnership way back at CES 2020. Ultimately, plans to put Digit to work making last-mile deliveries fizzled, as the company instead pivoted focus to the nearer-term issue of warehouse staffing. That proved to be a canny move, as labor figures still have yet to return post-COVID. Former Agility CEO Damion Shelton told me last week that last-mile is still on the table, but there’s more than enough to focus on in the warehouse and manufacturing sectors to keep the company occupied.
Putting together a C-suite has been an important piece of the company’s growth over the past 12 months. Co-founders Shelton and Jonathan Hurst have shifted roles, from CEO and CTO to president and chief robotics officer, respectively. A week ago today, former Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took the chief executive role over from Shelton. Last year, the company named Fetch founder and CEO Melonee Wise to the CTO role and brought former Apple and Ford executive Aindrea Campbell in as COO.
Agility Robotics’ new CEO is ‘focused on the here and now’
The recent alterations in leadership hint at the company paying more attention to commercialization. These changes also place Agility amongst an exclusive group of leading robotics firms, boasting female leadership in five out of its nine top executive positions.
Agility is intensifying its production volumes, setting sights on reaching high two-figure production of its bipedal robot by the year end. This week, during Modex, Agility publicly introduced their Agility Arc – a software used for the deployment and fleet management of Digit.
“The automation platform incorporates all essential features one would anticipate from a fleet management system, such as battery and charging management, workflow management, and robot tasking,” Wise informed TechCrunch. “Moreover, it includes the necessary elements for system deployment, configuration, remote monitoring, and support. It’s a unified dashboard allowing you to control all aspects related to managing a fleet of Digits.”
Johnson, the previous director of Magic Leap’s enterprise transition, expressed her belief that her new company stands on firmer ground due to the implementation of new enterprise software.
“What really impressed me about the new cloud automation system is its indication of our company’s growth,” Johnson states. “This isn’t just a device—it’s designed to integrate. With [Johnson’s previous employer] Microsoft, that was often the stumbling block. We would have a separate system that wasn’t connected with everything else and therefore couldn’t deliver its full potential value. So the fact that it can link up with WMS systems and other tools already in use by the company provides a great deal of relief.”
Johnson describes her experience with Modex as highly educational. She communicated with us last week from Japan, where she had recently run in the Tokyo marathon. She flew back to the U.S. over the weekend specifically to gain firsthand knowledge of the supply chain/logistics world which she is now a part of. “I made it a point to be here to not only meet the customers, but also to understand the working environment of these devices. I’m going to spend much of today just walking around and immersing myself in this setting.”
Johnson’s major selling point as a CEO is quick return on investment (ROI). This is largely possible due to the availability of Digit as a RaaS (robotics-as-a-service) model. This approach has been enticing more companies to take the plunge, as it removes the concern of significant initial costs.
The future of Digit is largely shaped by its customers. For instance, a model recently showcased an automotive workflow with a new set of end effectors. Instead of the flipper-like appendages previously used by the company, this Digit is outfitted with two sets of hooked fingers on each hand, oriented in opposite directions. This design does not offer mobile dexterity, but rather focuses on what Digit has been doing all along – moving totes.
In this context, the totes are rather large (as typical in the automotive line), thus preventing the robot from holding them from both sides. Instead, the effectors grab onto the front of the totes, providing a stable grip on a box which often has heavy, loose items inside.
Wise sees a future where Digit would have the capability to change its end effectors as per the requirement.
“When you look at the end effector specifically, there’s about 60 years of prior art,” she says. “All of [Modex], if you look around, all of these robot arms have different end effectors. That’s a very well understood thing. There’s something called ‘end of arm tooling.’ It’s swappable. What we’re going to be driving toward as a product is having swappable end of arm tooling and eventually make that an automated process.”
With what could be perceived as a dig at some of the humanoid robot competition, Shelton notes, “but interestingly, 0% of the solutions are five-fingered, 27-degrees of freedom hands.” He adds, “there have been some of our competitors who have been on the record saying that they are using a five-fingered hand basically as a branding exercise.”
As far as what the competition should be focused on, Wise believes Agility’s peers should center on safety — a huge concern when introducing new technologies into a warehouse setting. “We need to, collectively as an industry, get our safety story straight,” she says. “We as an industry need to come together and decide what the safety norms are.”
Johnson adds that companies need to focus on the task at hand. “Stay focused on the here and now and what can be done,” she says. “Everyone needs a roadmap, but stay focused and prove it out.”
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