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The humanoid race is continuous to warmth up. Agility Robotics kicked off the week by naming Peggy Johnson its chief govt officer. Johnson is a veteran expertise chief who most just lately served as CEO of Magic Leap, which produces augmented actuality headsets. She led the corporate’s shift from shopper to enterprise, recapitalized the corporate and extra.
Agility Robotics co-founder Damion Shelton has served as CEO because the firm’s founding in 2015. Shelton will now be the corporate’s president and a part of Johnson’s management workforce. Johnson will information Agility’s subsequent part of development because it expands business deployments, broadens its product portfolio, and prepares to fabricate Digit at scale.
Earlier than Magic Leap, Johnson spent six years as govt vp of enterprise growth at Microsoft. She reported on to CEO Satya Nadella and was chargeable for driving strategic partnerships and transactions to speed up development for the corporate and its clients. Johnson launched M12, Microsoft’s first company enterprise fund that in three years had added greater than 80 firms to its portfolio.
“Peggy Johnson’s lengthy monitor document of engineering and enterprise success at Qualcomm and Microsoft, and her latest achievements driving change as CEO of Magic Leap, make her the proper chief to take Agility by the transition from cutting-edge expertise startup to main international robotics firm. I couldn’t be extra excited to have her be part of us,” mentioned Shelton. “I additionally need to acknowledge the unbelievable work of our staff and our management workforce in driving Agility’s success up to now. With Peggy on the helm, Agility can deliver robotics to new heights.”
Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson
Previous to Microsoft, she spent 24 years at Qualcomm, the place she served as a member of the corporate’s govt committee and held numerous management positions throughout engineering, gross sales, advertising, and enterprise growth. She was chargeable for main the Web Providers division, which launched a cellular app downloading platform, BREW, in 2001. BREW enabled the obtain of billions of apps to cell phones, which enhanced Qualcomm’s chip gross sales and produced over $1 billion in income from app gross sales.
“I’m thrilled to be becoming a member of the best robotics workforce on the planet,” mentioned Johnson. “In a discipline cluttered with ‘demo-ware’ and hype, Agility stands aside for having resolutely, steadily, and remarkably made a human-centric robotic that really works—and in demanding buyer environments. Damion Shelton and his distinctive workforce have positioned the corporate for international scale and development throughout industries. Collectively, we’ll make Agility the world’s most trusted maker of robots which can be as useful to staff as they’re helpful to backside strains. That is Agility’s time.”
Digit is the world’s solely bipedal robotic presently delivering productive work for purchasers. It’s also the one deployment-ready bipedal robotic that’s engineered to adjust to OSHA’s stringent security requirements and demonstrated to run giant AI fashions to adapt dynamically to new duties.
That is one other vital transfer for Agility Robotics because it gears as much as manufacture its Digit humanoid at scale. In Could 2023, the corporate named Melonee Clever CTO. Clever offered autonomous cellular robotic maker (AMR) Fetch Robotics to Zebra Applied sciences in 2021 for $290 million.
Digit humanoid leads approach
The Digit humanoid stands 5 ft. 9 in. (1.75 m) tall and might carry payloads as much as 35 lb. (16 kg). Digit has been in growth for a number of years now, however in late 2023 Amazon introduced it’s testing Digit in an R&D warehouse close to Seattle. The preliminary job is to assist with tote recycling.
GXO Logistics, the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics supplier, is additionally testing Digit. It’s also being examined for tote recycling at a Spanx facility in Flowery Department, Ga. On this pilot, Digit is shifting totes off of AMRs and onto a conveyor. The AMRs, which seem like Chucks from 6 River Methods, deliver the packed totes to a switch station. Digit then makes use of its notion system to detect the AMR has arrived.
Later this yr, Agility will open RoboFab, a 70,000-square-foot robotic manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon. Agility anticipates manufacturing capability of a whole bunch of Digit robots within the first yr, with the aptitude to scale to greater than 10,000 robots per yr at this location. Agility mentioned Digit is engineered to satisfy the protection necessities for deployment in OSHA-regulated industries.
Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robotic officer of Agility Robotics, will keynote the Robotics Summit & Expo, which runs Could 1 and a couple of in Boston and is produced by The Robotic Report. The occasion expects greater than 5,000 attendees and is designed to assist robotics engineers overcome the technical challenges of constructing business robots.
Humanoid race heating up
Almost a dozen firms worldwide launched humanoid prototypes in 2023. That features Determine AI, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based firm that final week raised $675 million in Collection B funding.
Ash Sharma, managing director at Work together Evaluation, has mentioned warehousing affords humanoids the proper mixture of repetitiveness and menial work, coupled with a scarcity of standardization and a scarcity of uniformity of issues dealt with. For firms working achievement facilities with a large product combine or fluctuating demand, the flexibleness of humanoid robots may ship an answer to the continued labor and abilities disaster within the logistics business.
He added that Work together Evaluation’ analysis suggests the flexibleness and scalability humanoid robots provide could possibly be a attainable reply to ongoing labor and abilities shortages. Nevertheless, it doesn’t come with out problems, and it’s but to be seen whether or not these might be simply overcome to see their speedy deployment in warehouses.
The Worldwide Federation of Robotics (IFR) included humanoids as considered one of its high robotics traits for 2024. Microsoft co-founder Invoice Gates additionally just lately shared 5 robotics startups that he’s enthusiastic about. Three of these are centered on humanoids, together with Agility, Apptronik, and RoMeLa from UCLA.
And though it hasn’t introduced any plans to commercialize its humanoid, Boston Dynamics just lately launched a video displaying Atlas selecting and inserting automotive struts. The importance of the demo is that Atlas performs the entire object recognition utilizing the robotic’s onboard sensors. Atlas acquires the automotive struts, utilizing its grippers from a vertical storage unit, and locations them horizontally onto a circulate cart.
