Maybe some In a few years, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be filled with humanoid robots during Modex week. However, in 2024, Digit will be alone at the supply chain fair. It's a testament to Agility's healthy advantage over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X, and Apptronik. Last year around this time at Modex (the Chicago version of the conference), Digit had an industrial automation launch party of sorts. A line of bipedal robots moved containers to a nearby conveyor belt at select times during the week.
This week in Atlanta, an eight-figure rotating cast works every day from the start to the close of the show. This time, however, the blue and silver robots are doing something a little different. Demonstrations show in-line replenishment and container retrieval with a flow rack designed for automotive manufacturing. Agility tells TechCrunch that he is currently working with automotive clients, although he has not released any names yet.
Ford famously was among the earliest proponents of Agility, announcing a partnership at CES 2020. Ultimately, plans to put Digit to work making last-mile deliveries fell through, as the company turned its attention to the problem more short-term warehouse staffing. This turned out to be a shrewd move, as job numbers have yet to return post-COVID. Former Agility CEO Damion Shelton told me last week that the last mile is still on the table, but that there is more than enough to focus on in the warehouse and manufacturing sectors to keep the company busy.
Assembling senior management has been an important piece of the company's growth over the past 12 months. Co-founders Shelton and Jonathan Hurst have changed roles, from CEO and CTO to president and chief robotics officer, respectively. A week ago today, former Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took over as CEO, replacing Shelton. Last year, the company named Fetch founder and CEO Melonee Wise to the role of chief technology officer and hired former Apple and Ford executive Aindrea Campbell as chief operating officer.
Leadership changes indicate that a company is taking marketing more seriously. They also place Agility in a rare place among leading robotics companies, with women in five of its nine management positions.
Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to reach “double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by the end of the year. This week at Modex, the company introduced Agility Arc, the fleet management and deployment software for Digit.
“The automation platform has all the things you would expect from a fleet management system, in terms of battery, charge management, workflow management, and robot tasks,” Wise tells TechCrunch. “But it also has other aspects that are needed to implement and configure a system and remotely monitor and support the system. “It’s a single pane of glass that allows you to basically do everything related to managing a fleet of Digits.”
Johnson, who previously led Magic Leap's shaky business, says the new business software gave him confidence that his new company is on more secure footing than his old one.
“What was really encouraging when I learned about the new cloud automation system is that it's a sign of the company's maturation,” he says. “This is not just a device, it is something that must be integrated. Very often at Microsoft (Johnson's former employer), that would be the stumbling point. Here we would have an isolated system that was not integrated with everything else and did not provide the value that it could. So the fact that it can integrate with WMS systems and other things that the company is already using takes a lot of weight off of them.”
Image credits: Brian Heater
For Johnson, Modex has been a huge learning experience. He spoke to us last week from Japan, where he had recently competed in the Tokyo Marathon. She hopped on a plane back to the United States over the weekend specifically to get a first-hand view of the world of supply chain and logistics she is now a part of. “I wanted to make sure I was here to see not only the customers, but also the environment in which the devices operate. Today I will spend a lot of time walking around and immersing myself in that.”
Johnson's main pitch as CEO is a quick path to return on investment. This can be achieved in large part thanks to the fact that Digit is available through a RaaS (robotics as a service) model, which has become an increasingly popular way to convince companies to take the leap. Customers can now try these systems without having to worry about huge upfront costs.
It is those customers who ultimately shape Digit's future. The ground model demonstrating an automotive workflow has a new pair of end effectors. Instead of the fin-style appendages the company has been showing off, this digit has four digits of its own on each hand, with two pairs of hooked fingers facing in opposite directions. However, this is not skillful mobile manipulation. Instead, it is designed to do what Digit has been doing all along: transport containers.
However, the containers here are quite wide (as is customary in the automotive line), which prevents the robot from hugging them with one arm on each side. Instead, the effectors grip the front of the containers. This method also allows for a more stable grip on a box that often has heavy, loose objects rolling around inside it.
In the not-too-distant future, Wise imagines a version of Digit that can swap out its end-effectors as needed.
“When we look specifically at the end effector, there are about 60 years of prior art,” he says. “All of them (Modex), if you look around, all of these robotic arms have different end effectors. That is something very well understood. There is something called “end of arm tools”. It is interchangeable. “What we are going to achieve as a product is have interchangeable end-of-arm tooling and eventually make it an automated process.”
With what could be perceived as a foray into the humanoid robot competition, Shelton notes, “but interestingly, 0% of the solutions are five-fingered hands and 27 degrees of freedom.” He adds: “There have been some of our competitors who have gone on record saying that they are using a five-fingered hand basically as a branding exercise.”
As for what the competition should focus on, Wise believes Agility peers should focus on security, a big concern when introducing new technologies into a warehouse environment. “We need to, collectively as an industry, get our safety story straight,” he says. “We as an industry need to come together and decide what the safety standards are.”
Johnson adds that companies must focus on the task at hand. “Stay focused on the here and now and what can be done,” he says. “Everyone needs a roadmap, but stay focused and try it.”
