Agility Robotics Is Opening a Humanoid Robot Factory In Oregon (cnbc.com) 52
Agility Robotics is wrapping up construction of a factory in Salem, Oregon, where it plans to mass produce its first line of humanoid robots, called Digit. Each robot has two legs and two arms and is engineered to maneuver freely and work alongside humans in warehouses and factories. CNBC reports: The 70,000-square-foot facility, which the company is calling the "RoboFab," is the first of its kind, according to Damion Shelton, co-founder and CEO of Agility Robotics. COO Aindrea Campbell, who was formerly Apple's senior director of iPad operations and an engineering manager at Ford, told CNBC that the facility will have a 10,000 unit annual max capacity when it's fully built out and will employ more than 500 people. For now, though, Agility Robotics is focused on the installation and testing of its first production lines.
Funded by DCVC and Playground Global among venture investors, Agility Robotics beat would-be competitors to the punch, including Tesla with its Optimus initiative, by completing development of production prototype humanoid robots and standing up a factory where it can mass produce them. Shelton told CNBC that his team developed Digit with a human form factor so that the robots can lift, sort and maneuver while staying balanced, and so they could operate in environments where steps or other structures could otherwise limit the use of robotics. The robots are powered with rechargeable lithium ion batteries.
One thing Digit lacks is a five-fingered hand -- instead, the robot's hands look more like a claw or mitten. [...] Digit can traverse stairs, crouch into tight spaces, unload containers and move materials onto or off of a pallet or a conveyor, then help to sort and divide material onto other pallets, according to Agility. The company plans to put the robots to use transporting materials around its own factory, Campbell said. Agility's preferred partners will be first to receive the robots next year, and the company is only selling -- not renting or leasing -- the systems in the near term.
Funded by DCVC and Playground Global among venture investors, Agility Robotics beat would-be competitors to the punch, including Tesla with its Optimus initiative, by completing development of production prototype humanoid robots and standing up a factory where it can mass produce them. Shelton told CNBC that his team developed Digit with a human form factor so that the robots can lift, sort and maneuver while staying balanced, and so they could operate in environments where steps or other structures could otherwise limit the use of robotics. The robots are powered with rechargeable lithium ion batteries.
One thing Digit lacks is a five-fingered hand -- instead, the robot's hands look more like a claw or mitten. [...] Digit can traverse stairs, crouch into tight spaces, unload containers and move materials onto or off of a pallet or a conveyor, then help to sort and divide material onto other pallets, according to Agility. The company plans to put the robots to use transporting materials around its own factory, Campbell said. Agility's preferred partners will be first to receive the robots next year, and the company is only selling -- not renting or leasing -- the systems in the near term.
Standard corporate strategy (Score:2)
Get rid of the pesky humans that might form a union or show initiative. in some sub-optimal way. Replace with robotics. Everybody wins. Especially the shareholders. But also the human who no longer has to deal with a boss yelling at them. That thought will comfort them as they starve to death and we're rid of them once and for all.
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If only there was some way to regulate corporations. Oh well, I guess we are doomed.
Re:Standard corporate strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
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I mean, that's one way to look at it. Another way is you have a plant full of high school graduates who are making a little extra money for the next stage of their life. They don't want to make a career out of tool & die whatevering.
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UBI .. Decades ago, I had a coworker who was hired for basically data-entry. Anyway, he figured out how to replace his job entirely with a shell script. He kept that gig for nearly 2 years and finally quit out of boredom and running out of ways to annoy the rest of us. Anyway, that's what UBI can do with the right regulatory framework, a robot can be thought of as owned by the person whose "job" it replaced. He gets the salary that the robot would generate, and the company would make even more money because
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Get rid of the pesky humans that might form a union or show initiative. in some sub-optimal way. Replace with robotics. Everybody wins. Especially the shareholders. But also the human who no longer has to deal with a boss yelling at them. That thought will comfort them as they starve to death and we're rid of them once and for all.
This has been ongoing since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it has generally improved the quality of life for humanity in the long run. It may be a bit painful in the beginning, but it will do away with a lot of mundane and dangerous work.
Re: Standard corporate strategy (Score:2)
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Dollars to pennies (Score:2)
I am expecting this thing to break down, get stuck or need supervision otherwise very often.
They'll probably be 50% as productive as a human (totally fine if 100% autonomous with 24 hour shifts) and need a human handler...
The sole question of interest: What is the ratio of robot to handler?
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The sole question of interest: What is the ratio of robot to handler?
When you use up a human you just hire another one. When you use up a robot you have to pay to repair, replace, or refurbish.
Re: Dollars to pennies (Score:2)
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Probably be something similar to a self checkout lane at the grocery store. A single human who maintains a fleet of robotic workers.
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That's basically what I said. The economic viability is directly tied to how large of a "fleet"we're talking. Two? That would be rather bad. Two hundred? Now we're talking.
Not a lot of detail (Score:3)
Can it take a fall? Even more importantly, can it pick itself up afterwards? Does it require perfect custom objects to grab, or can it lift a variety of shapes, without damaging them? Can it stack a skid on a shrink wrap machine? Can it read a damaged label? How much of it's brain is onboard, how much on a wirelessly connected server? Can it take verbal direction / correction from a human, and can it identify who is authorized to give it certain types of instructions?
And as much as they deride digits as unnecessary... this robot won't be able to apply labels or open a loading dock door.
Oh... and can you put a RealDoll skin on it? ...just asking for a friend.
Re:Not a lot of detail (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember a lot of those concerns when robots were introduced into the auto manufacturing process. There were concerns on whether they could weld properly, pick up parts reliably, and perform other needed tasks. Fast-foward a few years and they have replaced a sizable amount of the skilled labor in the process and brought quality and consistancy up considerably. Add to the fact that they can work 24/7, don't get injured, and don't cause HR issues; and you can see why they wre so pervasice. Its only a matter of time before they will be more common in most workplaces.
And honestly, this is nothing new. In the end, robots are just machines. Before bull dozers people dug holes with shovels. Before blenders, people chopped up stuff by hand. Before forklifts, people manually lifted and moved heavy objects. Machines can replace people in boring, repetitive, dangerous tasks and that's a good thing. No one is going to feel bad when a robot replaces someone at the fry station at McDonalds.
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Machines can replace people in boring, repetitive, dangerous tasks and that's a good thing.
I'm familiar with the "buggy whips" argument, yet somehow I'm not convinced that replacing those jobs is ultimately a good thing. I think it was good in the past, but today it seems to me that we face running out of ways for humans to be gainfully employed.
Now if all the wealth was more evenly distributed - and in "wealth" I include labour-saving devices and their economic benefits - then I'd be less worried. But when more and more wealth and control reside in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the ma
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"today it seems to me that we face running out of ways for humans to be gainfully employed"
That reminds me of the famous quote from the buggy whip era. Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented."
Do you honestly believe people will ever run out of jobs they can and will pay others to do?
Also, do you think tech should not be allowed if it aids in efforts that cost humans jobs?
Sure,
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There are orders of magnitude of difference between the two situations. An assembly line fixed robot with parts pre-organized on a conveyor is not a semi-autonomous free-roams humanoid stock mover.
So far as I am aware, there is no reason to even use a humanoid form - in a warehouse you're far better off with a pair of loader arms on a swivel mounted on a pallet truck.
If they've managed to make a general humanoid labour robot that's not just Slashdot news, that's front page of every science and news site ev
See here? (Score:2)
This cassette has special tape inside it that holds the movements of your new robot. You program in the help routines from this remote. Let me just plug that in, now all we need to do is act out the program, rewind the tape, put it in normal mode and run the program by depressing the play button.
It's the latest in cyber. I'm very excited.
OK I guess (Score:2)
The hand/gripper leaves a lot to be desired though, then again nobody can seem to get that right from both a software and hardware/sensor perspective.
Humanoid Robot (Score:2)
Can it speak Bocce?
I need to see it doing a job (Score:5, Insightful)
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One advantage of a human is their incredibly versatile hands. I don't think a mitten hand will compete.
It hasn't even got a thumb.
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I was just looking through the videos on their YouTube channel to see if there were any use-cases demonstrated. Other than taking boxes on and off shelves, and carrying them around, I don't see anything. I guess we'll see, but if there were useful tasks it could do right now, I think they'd put that on video, so I'm thinking they're not there yet. Like self-driving cars, they may be assuming that they're nearly there, only to find that the step from "nearly there" to "there" is rather harder than they thoug
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I was just looking through the videos on their YouTube channel to see if there were any use-cases demonstrated. Other than taking boxes on and off shelves, and carrying them around, I don't see anything. I guess we'll see, but if there were useful tasks it could do right now, I think they'd put that on video, so I'm thinking they're not there yet. Like self-driving cars, they may be assuming that they're nearly there, only to find that the step from "nearly there" to "there" is rather harder than they thought.
You've just described a good portion of Amazon's work force. This would excel in a distribution center, and in a few years, will be perfect for stocking shelves in a department or grocery store. Pair this with self-driving delivery vans, and you just made a human free delivery service. I'm sure Walmart would love to turn all their stores into home delivery or parking lot pickup locations where no one entered other than the one or two people who work there. And it would drastically cut store losses and th
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Is the problem that products don't get designed from an automated manufacture perspective?. I don't know if it's a people thing or a CAD thing, where the CAD tools don't seem to give a shit about ensuring it can be bot-made. In my opinion product design should consider robotic manufacturability way ahead of both function and form.
Agility? (Score:1)
Re: Agility? (Score:2)
Wake Me Up (Score:2)
Robotics Technology Agility Robotics Is Opening a Humanoid Robot Factory In Oregon
As opposed to a human robot factory? Wake me up when the robots are operating the robot factory.
Fine, I'll say it (Score:1)
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There's a sucker born every day.
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It's a start (Score:2)
Humaniform (Score:2)
Getting closer (Score:2)
A few more steps to be worked out and we'll have a pleasure model replicant.
every robot... (Score:2)
Every robot will be painstakingly hand made to our highest standards.
Magic (Score:2)
Digit? (Score:2)
The robot does not even have hands, and they call it digit?
Without hands this robot will be very limited in what it is useful for. Like stacking boxes, but you can already buy a purpose built industrial robot that isn't designed just to mimic the human form. For getting actual work done in the industrial setting the human form is sub-optimal. Powering it with batteries, compared to dedicated wired-in industrial robots will require downtime just for swapping batteries. Can you train the robot to swap its ow
Why does Slashdot post stories that cannot be seen (Score:1)
sophya (Score:1)
If you find yourself struggling (Score:1)