Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot humanoid robot training facility in Fremont, California, down the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year.
Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be the “biggest product ever” once it becomes “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.”
While Agility doesn’t have Tesla’s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is actually useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and boxes into manufacturing spaces and warehouses for clients such as Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company says it has secured contracts worth $300 million for its robots.
“It’s great to have you [Tesla] “In the same space as us, because actually, Agility has been out there on its own for a long time, and it’s nice to have others in the human space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We’ve done the marketing. We now know what it takes to get into these facilities and meet their security rules, regulatory barriers, compliance, connect to their IT infrastructure, and connect to their warehouse management system.
Agility has not disclosed how many Digits it has created or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked on experimental or revenue-generating deployments. The company, for example, said that its numbers Go 100000 Hand luggage at GXO logistics facility.
Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse merger that is expected to make it the first purely human robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who have developed new technologies that allow robots to walk safely on two legs, Agility is trying to build on its edge over a new generation of AI-inspired robotics startups like Figure, 1X, Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics.
While the arrival of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to MBA also promises major advances in automated behavior, Agility is taking a pragmatic approach to autonomy.
“When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-human example, you don’t really want to control the anti-lock brakes under the control of an AI,” Damion Shelton, co-founder and CEO of Agility, told TechCrunch. “The analogue with humanoid robots is all the safety stuff you need to go down a path that’s not generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack.”
However, what AI does do is deliver on the promise at scale.
“One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] “We asked how we would go about programming robot applications, and we didn’t really have a good answer,” Shelton said. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far greater than the number of engineers who can program robots. Generative AI answers this question conclusively.
The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in talks with the company about deploying Digit, and the new facility will be where the six-foot-tall robot learns new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field.
Unlike many new entrants to the humanoid robotics space, Agility does not plan to introduce indoor humanoid robots into the home anytime soon. It’s a view consistent with that of most independent robotics experts, who believe that today’s most powerful robots are not safe enough for consumer use. Digit operates in a human-free space for now, but Version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will have the ability to sense humans and won’t need to be kept in a robot-only area.
Jonathan Hirst, co-founder and head of robotics, said there is a lot of work to keep Agility busy in manufacturing and logistics alone.
“Let’s start with the boxes and bags, and then let’s do the picking and processing,” Hirst told TechCrunch. “Then let’s start working on cardboard, which is really difficult, loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Well, now we’re up to 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”
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