Perhaps a couple of years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center shall be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, nonetheless, Digit stands alone at the availability chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X and Apptronik. This time last 12 months 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 close-by conveyor belt at select times throughout the week.
This week in Atlanta, a rotating solid of eight Digits are working every day from show opening to shut. This time, nonetheless, 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’s currently working with automotive customers — though it has yet to release any names.
Famously, Ford was amongst Agility’s first proponents, announcing a partnership way back at CES 2020. Ultimately, plans to place Digit to work making last-mile deliveries fizzled, as the corporate as a substitute 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 remains to be on the table, but there’s good enough to concentrate on within the warehouse and manufacturing sectors to maintain the corporate occupied.
Putting together a C-suite has been a very important piece of the corporate’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. Every week ago today, former Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took the chief executive role over from Shelton. Last 12 months, the corporate named Fetch founder and CEO Melonee Sensible to the CTO role and brought former Apple and Ford executive Aindrea Campbell in as COO.
The leadership changes point to an organization taking commercialization more seriously. In addition they put Agility in rare air amongst top robotics firms, with women in five of its nine C-suite roles.
Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to hit “high double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by end of 12 months. This week at Modex, the corporate took the wraps off Agility Arc, deployment and fleet management software for Digit.
“The automation platform has all the belongings you would expect from a fleet management system, by way of battery, charging management, workflow management and robot tasking,” Sensible tells TechCrunch. “But it surely also has the opposite facets that you just need for deploying and configuring a system and remotely monitoring and supporting the system. It’s a single pane of glass that means that you can principally do every thing related to managing a fleet of Digits.”
Johnson, who previously helmed Magic Leap’s shaky pivot into enterprise, says the brand new enterprise software gave her confidence that her recent company has surer footing than her last.
“The thing that was really encouraging after I learned concerning the recent cloud automation system is that it’s such an indication of the maturation of the corporate,” she says. “This will not be just a tool, it’s something that’s meant to integrate. So often at [Johnson’s former employer] Microsoft, that may be the trip-up point. You’d have some isolated system over here that wasn’t integrated with every thing else and didn’t provide the worth that it could. So, the incontrovertible fact that it would find a way to integrate with WMS systems and other things the corporate is already using is an enormous weight off them.”
Image Credits: Brian Heater
For Johnson, Modex has been an enormous learning experience. She spoke to us last week from Japan, where she had recently competed within the Tokyo marathon. She hopped on a plane back to the States over the weekend specifically to get a first-hand view of the availability chain/logistics world of which she is now an element. “I desired to ensure I used to be here to see not only the shoppers, however the environment the devices work in. I’m going to spend lots of time walking around today and immerse myself in that.”
Johnson’s primary pitch as CEO is a fast path to ROI. That’s achievable in no small part to the incontrovertible fact that Digit is obtainable through a RaaS (robotics-as-a-service) model, which has change into an increasingly popular technique to persuade firms to take the leap. Customers can now pilot these systems without having to fret about massive upfront costs.
It’s those customers who ultimately shape Digit’s future. The model on the ground demonstrating an automotive workflow has a brand new pair of end effectors. Somewhat than the flipper-style appendages the corporate has been showcasing, this Digit has 4 digits of its own on each hand, with two pairs of hooked fingers facing in opposite directions. This isn’t dexterous mobile manipulation, nonetheless. As an alternative, it’s designed to do the thing that Digit has been doing all along: transporting totes.
The totes listed here are quite wide nonetheless (as is custom on the automotive line), prohibiting the robot from embracing it with an arm on both sides. As an alternative the effectors grasp the front of the totes. This method also affords a more stable grip on a box that usually has heavy, untethered objects rolling around inside.
Within the not too distant future, Sensible envisions a version of Digit that may swap out its end effectors as needed.
“Whenever you take a look at the tip effector specifically, there’s about 60 years of prior art,” she says. “All of [Modex], for those who go searching, all of those robot arms have different end effectors. That’s a thoroughly 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 automatic process.”
With what may very well be perceived as a dig at among 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 a few of our competitors who’ve been on the record saying that they’re using a five-fingered hand principally as a branding exercise.”
So far as what the competition needs to be focused on, Sensible believes Agility’s peers should center on safety — an enormous concern when introducing recent technologies right into a warehouse setting. “We’d like to, collectively as an industry, get our safety story straight,” she says. “We as an industry need to come back together and judge what the protection norms are.”
Johnson adds that firms have to concentrate on the duty at hand. “Stay focused on the here and now and what could be done,” she says. “Everyone needs a roadmap, but stay focused and prove it out.”
