Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility in Fremont, California, just up the highway from Tesla's factory where Elon Musk plans to start making Optimus robots this year. Because nothing says 'friendly competition' like literally parking your robot training center next to the world's most hyped humanoid project.
While Musk has called Optimus 'the biggest product ever' (pending its ability to be 'useful outside of Tesla sometime next year'), Agility has a robot called Digit that's already earning its keep. Digit carries totes and bins for customers like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and the company has secured $300 million in contract orders. Take that, vaporware.
'It's great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone,' CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch, with the tone of someone who's been doing the work while others gave TED Talks. 'We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system.'
Agility hasn't disclosed how many Digits it has built, but outside observers estimate dozens have been deployed. For example, Digits have moved 100,000 totes at a GXO logistics facility - a milestone that probably doesn't make for a great earnings call but is still pretty impressive for a robot that walks on two legs.
Johnson is leading Agility through a reverse-merger expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by researchers who figured out how to make robots walk without face-planting, Agility is trying to stay ahead of newer AI-inspired startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, and Sunday Robotics.
While transformer-based neural networks promise big advances in robot behavior, Agility is taking a practical approach to autonomy. Co-founder Damion Shelton explains: 'When you think about self-driving cars, you really don't want the anti-lock brake controller under AI control. The analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that's not generative AI, right? You don't want to get creative with your safety stack.'
What AI does help with is scale. Shelton recalls board member Bruce Leak (the Quicktime inventor) asking how they'd code applications for the robot. 'We didn't really have a good answer. The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far larger than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI answers that question definitively.'
The new facility will accelerate deployments, with more than 30 customers in talks. It's where the six-foot-tall Digit will learn new skills in environments mimicking the real world. Unlike newer entrants, Agility isn't planning in-home humanoid robots anytime soon - a view shared by independent experts who think today's robots aren't safe enough for consumer use. Digit currently operates in human-free spaces, but version 5, due this fall, will sense humans and no longer need a robot-only zone.
Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst sees plenty of work in manufacturing and logistics: 'Let's start with the bins and the totes, and then let's do the picking and the kitting. And then let's start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers. Okay, now we're at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.'