Agility Robotics: Expanding Horizons with New Training Facility
Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, Calif., just off the interstate where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing its Optimus robots this year.
Emerging Competition in the Humanoid Robotics Arena
Tesla is banking more and more on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be “the biggest product ever” once it becomes “useful outside of Tesla next year.”
Even though Agility doesn’t have Tesla’s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue by transporting totes in manufacturing and warehouse environments for clients like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company claims to have secured $300 million in orders for its robots.
Agility Robotics’ Competitive Edge
“It’s great to have [Tesla] in the same space as us, because really, for a long time, Agility was alone, and it’s nice to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We brought it to market. We now know what it takes to go into these facilities and meet their security standards, their regulatory standards, their compliance, connect to their IT infrastructure, connect to their warehouse management system.”
Agility has not disclosed how many Digits it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company said, for example, that Digits moved 100,000 bins into a GXO logistics facility.
Strategic Moves and Market Positioning
Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse merger that is expected to make it the first purely humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques allowing robots to walk on two legs safely, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a new generation of AI-inspired robotics startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics.
While the arrival of the transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advances in robotic behavior, Agility takes a hands-on approach to autonomy.
“When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don’t want the anti-lock brake controller to be under the control of the AI,” Damion Shelton, co-founder and president of Agility, told TechCrunch. “The analog with humanoids is that everything security has to go through a path that isn’t generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your security stack.”
Leveraging AI for Scalability
However, what AI does do is deliver on its promise of scale.
“One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] We asked how we were going to go about coding applications for the robot, 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. And generative AI definitely answers this question.”
Facility’s Role in Future Deployments
The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotics 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 will learn new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field.
Unlike most newcomers to the humanoid field, Agility doesn’t plan to offer humanoid robots in homes anytime soon. It’s a view that aligns with that of most independent robotics experts, who say today’s most powerful robots aren’t safe enough for consumer use. Digit currently operates in a human-free space, but version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will have the ability to detect humans and will not need to be kept in a robot-only area.
Robots co-founder and director Jonathan Hurst said there was a lot of work to keep Agility busy just in manufacturing and logistics.
“Let’s start with bins and totes, then move on to selection and kitting,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “And then let’s start working on the cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading semi-trailers and things like that. Okay, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A billion-dollar business.”
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