Agility Robotics has opened a factory in Oregon to build 10,000 of its 'Digit' humanoid robots a year.
Agility Robotics has opened a factory in Oregon to build 10,000 of its 'Digit' humanoid robots a year.
At full scale, over 10,000 Digit robots will be built in Oregon annually
Here's a video showing this model of robot in action.
It will be interesting to see what capabilities these have, and how trainable they will be. They look like they can do simple warehouse work, but will they be much more capable than that?
Uh oh! if your job is slowly taking a box from a shelf semi-successfully, you better watch out!
I work in an environment like that. The bar is very low, it wouldn't take much to beat some humans at the job. Plus the robots can work 24/7 and don't (yet) complain about stuff. No HR or OSHA needed either.
I hope they cover the legs with something to prevent kids from pinching their fingers in that reverse knee joint area.
I always find it a bit inefficent to build humanoid robots to replace humans at a task. They're very complex and slow. Why not spend the money and rethink the task ie. warehousing already has been automated as well as a lot of things in manufacturing.
Don't get me wrong this is very cool to see but I can't think of many use cases for this.
To add on what others of said.
Part of its being able to stick it anywhere and a lot of things are built with the human body/arms in mind (not boxes obviously).
Do something stupid simple like getting grocery carts, it can have a hand that would be good enough or build a special gripper/mover that can have problems if some things change
The idea of making humanoid shapes is to provide more general flexibility for various tasks rather than a robot specialized for just one thing. It's the same reason for the goal of AGI vs. lots of narrow AI. There is a loss of effectiveness because of that, but the adaptability and universal nature perhaps could make up for it. It's true that doing it just because it's new might not always be the best solution. Other tools can be used as a hammer, but sometimes it's better to use the tool designed for the task rather than have one tool that does everything.
Now we just need to have them do the overcomplicated task of connecting a brain to it (including feedback) and handling the biological needs of said brain (oxygen, nutrition, immune, etc) and we'll have gone full circle. That is assuming the utility of that tech will not ever be largely outpaced by AI.
I agree. It seems like a lack of creativity trying to solve the problem of a "general purpose" robot.