Agility Robotics is building a 70,000-square-foot factory in Salem, Ore., that will be able to produce more than 10,000 of the company's Digit humanoid robots per year - which will work alongside humans on the factory floor. The new "RoboFab" manufacturing facility will open later this year, with customer deliveries expected to begin in 2024 and "general availability" in 2025. Agility expects to build "hundreds" of Digit humanoid robots in the first year and then gradually scale up.
In the video below, Agility COO Aindrea Campbell likens the RoboFab factory to Henry Ford's first manufacturing facility.
She said: "More than a hundred years ago, we had the world's first car manufacturing plant. I think it's the same moment now, we now have the world's first humanoid robot factory, and one day, just like cars, humanoid robots will be all over the world."
So, what is Digit? It is a bipedal robot 175 centimeters (5 feet 9 inches) tall and weighs about 65 kilograms (141 pounds). It can carry cargo weighing up to 16 kilograms (35 pounds) with a pair of claw-like grippers, and it can recharge itself and can theoretically be on duty for 16 hours out of a 24-hour period, which is equivalent to two full-time shifts.
It has a pair of legs that extend backwards like a bird like the company's Cassie robot, which broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100-meter sprint for a bipedal robot in 2022. Both robots have short upper limbs, usually held forward in a knee-up posture, and then long "shanks" extending back behind the torso, with high ankle joints, usually where the knees are, and down to the pads of the little toes that make contact with the ground.
The advantage of this is that "Digitte" can fold its legs so that the average person can make a loud noise. It can also squat down in front of a shelf to grab boxes without its knees protruding forward, which reduces the need for it to lean forward when grabbing boxes.
Equipped with camera vision and lidar, Digit has been around for several years - it was proposed by Ford as a package delivery robot back in 2019.
It's controlled via a gamepad-style tablet (and electronic shutdown starter) and is hard-coded for various tasks -- mostly "picking things up and putting things down" kind of tasks. Interestingly, over the past few months, Agility has been experimenting with large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence, effectively allowing Digit to program itself based on natural language passwords, as shown in the video below.
Digit will initially move cartons and totes at Agility's own factories and those of early customers. Next, the company hopes it can load and unload trucks. For now, the company has said little about more complex tasks, so Agility seems content to keep early use cases limited.
As for whether RoboFab is the world's first humanoid robot factory, this may be just the icing on the cake, because the Chinese company Fourier Intelligence announced in July this year that it will manufacture 100 GT-1 humanoid robots before the end of this year and deliver them to customers. Each robot can almost bear weight.
Regardless, there is growing evidence that the labor market is on the verge of another major transformation. Dozens of companies have now decided and convinced investors that the dawn of humanoid robot workers is coming and they need to prepare for the change.