Article Sidebar
Introduction
The burgeoning humanoid industry is not just building the most cutting-edge robotics hardware and software, it is also shouldering the responsibility of defining an entirely new category of industrial automation. The explosion of exaggerated humanoid demo videos might provide a nice short term boost for a particular Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), but achieving a safe operational deployment that delivers value to a customer is a completely different pursuit. That is what our entire organization has been building towards since 2015, and it’s where our focus is trained as we prepare to release our fifth generation humanoid this year.
For the past decade, as we’ve done the hard work of building a fully autonomous humanoid, we’ve also been focused on the realities of what it will take to scale our solutions into widespread adoption. The below are just a few of the many institutional decisions we’ve made that I believe will prove pivotal:
1. Initial product market fit
The use cases that our newest humanoid platform is capable of addressing originated in strong market signals from existing and potential customers in manufacturing, logistics, and distribution. When we first started deploying our humanoids, beginning with our 3rd generation Digit robot, these organizations were having trouble filling roles that demand repetitive physical tasks - and they still are. So the question we were initially faced with was, do we try to make a humanoid that can do everything a person can do all at once in these facilities? Or should we continue with a product that can deliver value right away, and add capabilities as the technology progresses?
We decided on the more pragmatic approach, which meant that our initial deployments have been focused on helping with bulk material handling tasks i.e. moving totes and bins. These tasks might not make for the best demo videos, but a humanoid that can handle them actually provides value for our customers today, to say nothing of the massive TAM associated with those workflows alone. But our pragmatic approach hasn’t meant that we stopped the development of additional workflow capabilities. With each deployment in bulk material handling, we gain real world data that we use to improve our models each and every day, and we’ve been working to refine our manipulation capabilities so that our fifth generation humanoid will be capable of much more.
2. Manipulation
Through these first few years of deployment, we observed a wide array of workflows that required levels of manipulation that our standard gripper couldn’t handle. As we aimed to move beyond tote manipulation, instead of developing a delicate five fingered hand that mimics a human’s morphology, we decided to build a modular system into our fifth generation humanoid that can adapt to the actual needs of a customer’s facility. That means swappable grippers. Digit will be able to handle a workflow that requires one tool, snap a different gripper onto the end of its arms, and then proceed to a different type of manipulation. The five fingered “all purpose” manipulators we see some other OEMs developing are too lightweight, and not durable enough for the industrial conditions we’ve become familiar with. When a robot falls, and every robot that balances on two legs eventually falls, these delicate fingers will break. Leaving customers scrambling to replace an expensive hand, all the while suffering from downtime. Our new solution doesn’t require any of this.
3. Data flywheel
Digit cannot remain a static piece of automation on a facility floor. It needs to be an adaptable platform that can become increasingly capable in more corners of customer operations every day. So we’ve been working to constantly improve our unique AI stack that makes this sort of embodied intelligence a reality. Data from every deployed humanoid now feeds back into the system and makes the fleet collectively smarter. It improves our AI model, which lets us build more skills on the robot, which opens up new verticals in each customer facility. This means that the rate at which we scale is also going to increase with each new deployment.
4. Battery life
With our latest deployments using our fourth generation Digit, we were able to achieve a 4:1 charge ratio on our battery. But in order to truly be a tireless partner, we determined that this wasn’t good enough. The battery in our fifth generation achieves a 10:1 charge ratio and has better overall storage capabilities, enabling Digit to rapidly charge and get back to work. After palletizing a set of materials and loading them onto a conveyor, while Digit waits for a new pallet to be delivered it will now step onto the charger for a few minutes. By doing so, we will have a robot that can operate through three shifts in a single day, expediting how quickly our customers will achieve break even ROI.
5. Supply chain
We source as many of the advanced technologies that go into building Digit as we can right here in the US, and are working to source the rest from trusted global suppliers. Further, we are committed to working with domestic suppliers to ensure our US based supply chain grows even more robust. We are actively monitoring the latest FCC regulations with regards to foreign robotics providers, and are positioning ourselves in a way that insulates us from any system shocks that may result.
6. Safety
When I look at the state of the industry, I don't see a lot of other companies talking about safety. That means they either can't figure it out yet and don't want to talk about it, or they're not really serious about deploying into operations in the near term. Anybody in this business knows you will not scale without a robot that is certified to be outside of a work cell that can work in close proximity to people.
Building a robot with functional safety in mind does not mean needing a robot that is ready to enter customer homes today in order to provide value. We believe that challenge will still take years to tackle. But we realize that you can’t deploy a hundred or a thousand robots in a facility if every single one of them requires a ten by twenty cage to work inside of, as all humanoids are currently required to do. As such, we’re designing the safety system of our fifth generation humanoid so that it’s capable of safely powering down its actuators before a person actually makes contact with it. By doing this, Digit will be capable of operating outside of a workcell, breaking down the single most important barrier to true scale.
7. Fleet maintenance
A great product on day one isn't enough for our customers, you have to sustain a solution’s health over months and years of real world deployment. We’ve learned that means building a service and support infrastructure that can monitor every robot we deploy in the field, every day. We've partnered with Ricoh to build that infrastructure out for us and keep fleets running with minimal downtime.
Looking ahead
Demographics are going to continue to force our hand more than they already have. The domestic labor gap in manufacturing and logistics for these kinds of repetitive roles has been widening for years, and every signal we track says that trend isn't reversing. We're seeing the same pattern across Europe and Asia: labor costs have risen to a point where many operators simply can't sustain the margins they need to keep running these facilities the way they always have, highly educated populations have little appetite for repetitive physical labor, and not enough working-age people to fill the roles regardless.
As I look ahead, I think that the category of industrial automation we’re building will be a story about roles that nobody was lining up to fill, at a scale that's only growing, in desperate search of a solution. It will also be a story about new kinds of work: fleets of humanoids won’t completely run themselves, they’ll need to be monitored, maintained, and supported, which will mean an entirely new category of skilled jobs will open up as this technology scales. Robots like Digit are the answer to a problem that the workforce is already straining under. And it takes a pragmatic OEM like Agility to truly rise to the occasion.
