During a visit last month to the world’s first humanoid robot factory, the latest edition of Agility Robotics Inc.’s bot lay flat on a table. There were shiny, stainless-steel actuators at its shoulder and hip joints, along with collections of circuits and sensors destined for the head and torso, all connected by neatly ordered sets of wire. It looked eerily similar to a human nervous system.
The robot was missing its limbs, part of a prototyping process to validate the design before workers install the hardware into the upcoming generation of Digit, the company’s teal and metal-gray bot.
Agility moved into the building it calls RoboFab, on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, earlier this year. The plant will produce its first bot, the vanguard of Digit’s fourth generation, sometime this month. “We have quite a few to deliver before the end of the year,” Peggy Johnson, Agility’s chief executive officer, said in an interview, without specifying the company’s target.
Agility, which has bots working at a Spanx warehouse operated by GXO Logistics Inc., and in testing at Amazon.com Inc. warehouses, is among a number of robot makers that are combining increasingly powerful batteries, motors and sensors with software that can help bots work in spaces designed for humans. The company invited Bloomberg News to RoboFab to witness the progress.
The Oregon State University spinoff has set up one of what will be as many as four production lines, with groups of stations set aside for assembly of arms, legs, torsos and head units. Racks full of bins for parts are mostly empty, and engineers are still documenting worker instructions and selecting tools for each job role.
There are nooks for testing Digit’s cameras and lidar, and a large area set aside for components that need to be tweaked outside the regular assembly line. On the other side of the 70,000-square-foot space is a robot hospital, where workers troubleshoot problems encountered by customers in the field.
Johnson calls the facility “capex light,” meaning it doesn’t require the expensive machinery one would find in an auto plant. Agility robots can mostly be assembled by humans wielding screwdrivers and other hand tools. Still, she says Agility, which has raised $180 million to date, will need to tap more money from investors to fund its transition from research and development to manufacturing.
Thanks to strong demand for the bots, Agility is starting that process now, said Johnson, who previously led augmented reality startup Magic Leap and held senior roles at Microsoft Corp. and Qualcomm Inc.
Originally, the RoboFab was to be overseen by Aindrea Campbell, a former Apple Inc. and Ford Motor Co. manufacturing leader, but she returned to Apple earlier this year. Instead, co-founder and former chief executive officer Damion Shelton will run the assembly operation. Johnson also hired Daniel Diez, a former Magic Leap colleague, as chief strategy officer. The company says the assembly plant will ultimately be able to produce 10,000 robots a year, an estimate predicated on massive demand and the company learning how to quickly stamp out the bots.
Humanoid robot makers were the subject of an investment frenzy earlier this year, based on the premise that startups, relying on ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence, could build robots capable of reasoning in their environments. Agility, which is also integrating large language models into Digit’s control software, is betting that getting more of its bots in workplaces will make up for the company’s lack of flashy hype.
Johnson notes that there are plenty of online videos of rival bots “making coffee and doing backflips,” but says “who’s actually working with customers taking shift work?”