Employees at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse near Seattle recently got a glimpse of the future of work: a 5-foot-9-inch robot that resembles a human, walks like a bird and has glowing white eyes. Called Digit, the machine is configured for one basic task: plucking empty yellow bins off a shelf and ferrying them several feet to a conveyor. Then doing it again. Over and over and over. The robot, in the testing phase, probably won’t transform the logistics industry anytime soon. But it’s a major technological leap forward, and it positions its maker, Agility Robotics Inc., at the vanguard of an effort to build machines that can toil alongside human workers. Where some robotics startups wax futuristic, imagining their machines ushering in an age of abundance or helping colonize planets, Tangent, Oregon-based Agility is resolutely down-to-earth.
It aims to build 10,000 robots a year and deploy them to warehouses and storerooms all over the world. The technologies that make Digit tick—increasingly affordable and powerful motors and batteries, computer vision, artificial intelligence—have sparked an investment boom in humanoid robots. Startups in the nascent field have hauled in some $1.6 billion in venture capital in the last five years, according to PitchBook data. Boston Dynamics Inc., best known for a four-legged robot “dog” called Spot, has a bipedal model that can do backflips. Tesla Inc., as well as startups such as 1X Technologies AS and Apptronik Inc., are plugging away on robots designed to mimic people. In February, Figure AI Inc. announced that Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and other big technology names were backing the humanoid bot startup as part of an investment round worth about $675 million.
Full story : Humanoid Robots at Amazon Provide Glimpse of an Automated Workplace.
Is your head still spinning from all the AI news of late? It will all seem so quaint when the useful humanoid robots arrive. See: Rise of the Robots: Breakthroughs in Humanoid Robotics and the Dawn of Embodied AI
