Envisioning a day when hundreds of humanoid robots can be summoned and deployed at the touch of a button, Agility Robotics has announced its first fleet management platform.
Why it matters: There's intense competition among humanoid robot manufacturers to get their products into the industrial marketplace, where companies like Amazon and BMW are eager for their help.
Driving the news: The new platform, Agility Arc, is a cloud-based tool that'll be able to command a robot army, say, to start moving bins to a conveyor belt at a particular time.
What they're saying: "The ability to control fleets of robots is something that everybody in the robotics business needs to do," Damion Shelton, president of Agility Robotics, tells Axios.
"I think we're the first humanoid robot vendor to have any solution offering on that front."
Agility "envisions ultimately very large deployments, into the hundreds," Shelton adds.
Where it stands: Walking, dexterous robots are gradually making the leap from the science lab to the workplace, requiring more sophisticated management systems.
Agility's robot, named Digit, is being tested by Amazon and GXO Logistics, which recently deployed it at a Spanx warehouse in Georgia.
A competing robot maker called Figure, which just garnered a massive investment from Jeff Bezos and OpenAI, is starting to staff a BMW production line β and said just yesterday that its robot can "now have full conversations with people on end-to-end neural networks."
Agility is opening a manufacturing facility in Oregon called RoboFab, with plans to eventually produce 10,000 two-legged robots annually.
The latest: Agility just hired a new CEO, Peggy Johnson, formerly of the augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap, to land new customers.
She's touting Digit's expanding skillset and specs β it's 5'9," 140 pounds and can lift 35 pounds from the floor to nearly 6 feet.
The company is planning a "robots as a service" model, in which it'll charge customers a monthly fee for their Digit fleet.
Catch up quick: In its earliest incarnations, Digit was controlled by "a single engineer with a laptop, telling the robot to do something," Shelton says.
Last year the system was upgraded so that multiple robots could be controlled at the same time to work together on a single task.
"Now what we have is a whole integrated fleet management system that allows you to coordinate multiple robots out of a single user interface," Shelton says.
"That's a big step towards the larger customer deployments, where you would have multiple robots operating within a customer environment and want to track the charge level, the success or failure rate of the robot, and statistics like how much load they've been carrying."
π€ Zoom in: Shelton gave the example of a warehouse that has an inbound tractor-trailer arriving at 3 p.m. with inventory that needs to be processed.
"So you need all the robots charged up and ready to go by 3 p.m," he says, "but you also have this body of work that needs to get done from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m."
With Agility Arc, "you can dynamically load-balance the fleet," Shelton says β ensuring there's constantly enough robots to get the day's work done.
Zoom out: Advances in humanoid robots are coming thick and fast.
Agility has been experimenting with integrating large language models and generative AI into Digit, so you can assign it tasks in natural language.
See a video of Digit being told verbally to "pick the box that's the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber and put it on top of the tallest box in the front row."
The H1 robot from a Chinese company called Unitree recently set the full-size humanoid robot speed record, moving at a top speed of 7.3 mph compared with the old record of 5.5 mph, per IOT World Today.
Yes, but: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and other federal agencies are still working out how to set safety rules governing the new metallic workers.
The bottom line: The humanoid robot revolution is upon us β expect these droids to start moving into industrial settings over the next few years, and then retail stores and our homes.