Employees at a warehouse near Seattle recently witnessed the future of work with the introduction of Digit, a bipedal robot developed by Agility Robotics Inc. This 5-foot-9-inch machine, designed to perform repetitive tasks like moving bins, represents a significant technological advancement in human-robot collaboration within work environments. While Digit is currently in the testing phase and may not revolutionize the logistics industry immediately, it underscores Agility's commitment to producing robots that can work alongside human employees.
Agility's pragmatic approach sets it apart from other robotics startups, with a focus on building 10,000 robots annually for deployment in warehouses globally. The rise of affordable and powerful technologies such as motors, batteries, computer vision, and artificial intelligence has fueled an investment surge in humanoid robots, attracting substantial venture capital over the past five years.
Other companies like Boston Dynamics Inc., and Tesla Inc., and startups such as 1X Technologies AS are also advancing humanoid robot technology. Figure AI Inc., supported by key tech players like Jeff Bezos and Microsoft, recently announced a major investment round. Unlike many of its competitors, Agility Robotics already has operational humanoid robots being tested, showcasing its practical application and real-world readiness. By adding experienced executives to its team, including Peggy Johnson as CEO, Agility is strengthening its commercial expertise to complement its innovative research background.
Amazon has shown confidence in Agility Robotics by investing in the startup, reflecting the potential for closer collaboration or acquisition in the future, similar to its acquisition of Kiva Systems Inc. a decade ago, a move that transformed the logistics industry.
Amazon’s Activity in Robotics
Source: Bloomberg reporting
“The humanoid robot is as close to a given as I could imagine from a technology,” says Adrian Stoch, chief automation officer at GXO Logistics Inc., which has tested Digit at a warehouse in Flowery Branch, Georgia. He gushed about Digit’s potential flexibility, imagining bots unloading trucks overnight so boxes are ready for human workers on the day shift, while the machines move on to other tasks.
Amazon, which redesigned its warehouses a decade ago around Kiva machines, sees bipedal bots filling roles in less automated corners of its facilities. Emily Vetterick, who’s running Amazon’s Digit trials, says a humanoid bot “doesn’t require the same space footprint, the same fencing, the same physical infrastructure” as a Kiva-style robot.
Agility’s utilitarian ethos can be traced to Jonathan Hurst, a co-founder of Oregon State University’s robotics program. He spent years studying legged locomotion, at one point testing a hopping monopod called Thumper. In 2015, Hurst, along with Mikhail Jones, a star pupil, and Damion Shelton, a pal from graduate school, founded Agility to commercialize that research.
Their first product, built with the help of a grant from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was a set of hips with legs that bent backward, resembling digitigrade animals like birds and cats that walk on their toes. They named the bot Cassie, a nod to the flightless cassowary bird.
Next came Digit, which gained a pair of rudimentary arms and a torso housing a battery pack and processing unit. The first customer was Ford Motor Co. in a 2019 pilot that explored using self-driving vans with robots inside to deliver packages. The project fizzled when it became clear that fully autonomous vehicles remained a long way off. If a person had to be on hand to drive the van, the robot helper became redundant.
“Our understanding of what we should deploy first with humanoids got more narrow” over time, says Shelton, Agility’s founding CEO, who will stay on as president after Johnson takes the top job. Specifically, that means warehouse and material-moving tasks, a market where Agility can prove and refine the technology before fanning it out to other sectors. Hurst has predicted that the business of humanoid robots will someday be larger than the automotive industry.
In place of hands, Digit has paddles at the end of its arms, and it can pick up boxes only when it uses both limbs together. Replicating the dexterity and precision of human hands has long vexed engineers. (A breakthrough robotic arm announced by Amazon in 2022 struggled to handle more than a third of the company’s inventory.) Agility’s clamplike approach sidesteps that hurdle for now. For years the robot was headless, but engineers added a blocky head with a pair of digital eyes to offer human co-workers cues about where it was moving.
For now, Digit’s role is limited to the final step of Amazon’s assembly line-like warehouses, grabbing empty bins and returning them to circulation. Ultimately, Agility’s goal is to win the bot other jobs—unloading trucks, taking apart pallets of merchandise, and similar tasks. As Pras Velagapudi, Agility’s chief architect and vice president of innovation, puts it: “What are the use cases to help unlock this becoming hundreds and thousands of robots in the facilities?”
The next step is firing up a Salem, Oregon, plant, located in an industrial park that was once a dairy farm run by convicts. Agility expects to complete the first production line sometime in the second quarter. It will build and refine test units for a few months, then send the first batches of beta robots to customers—possibly Amazon, GXO, or others Agility has yet to announce—in the last three months of the year.
Chief Operating Officer Aindrea Campbell, who’s been in manufacturing for 25 years, including stints at Apple Inc. and Ford, says Agility will probably produce “tens to early hundreds” of units during the next 12 months. Lifting that figure to 10,000 a year will take time, and Johnson, the incoming CEO, says the startup will have to evolve as it enters a new stage. “There’s a whole series of bars that you have to jump over to get a device into a customer’s manufacturing or factory facility smoothly,” she says. “All of that will be a bit of a transition for the company.”
Digit has a ways to go before it can compete with human workers. In a demo for journalists last year, Digit seemed to take longer just to turn around while carrying a tote than the time an Amazon worker spends to lift the tote, put it on a conveyor, and return for another. Limited battery life means Digit can operate for only a couple of hours at a time. Amazon has tried using them in shifts, with some working while others recharge (in a prone position evoking robot yoga). For now, the bots, whose interface was designed for researchers and software developers, are suitable only for companies with deep technological expertise.
It will be years before somebody can stop by a Home Depot and rent a pair of robot helpers, says Dwight Klappich, a vice president with researcher Gartner who tracks logistics technology. “I think the use cases are going to be somewhat limited for the foreseeable future,” he says. “We’re finding those places where they work.”
Stoch, the GXO executive involved in the Digit test run in Georgia, has a wish list for the robot, including hands that can grasp items and software that enables the bot to make more decisions on the fly. The company aims to incorporate humanoid robots, whether built by Agility or another vendor, into its operations permanently, he says.
So far, Stoch says, there’s been no blowback from workers fearing the bots will make them redundant—thanks in part to Digit’s circumscribed abilities. Still, Agility has learned to tread lightly when dropping Digit into the workplace. During one trial, a logistics company put reflective safety vests on the bots. “People had an immediate reaction to that, that now the robot is an equivalent, like a peer, like a person,” Hurst, Agility’s chief robot officer, told the Robots for the Rest of Us podcast. “It’s wearing the same safety equipment, and it looks the same, and they did not like that.” Agility declined to name the customer.
Prospective robot buyers emphasize that they’re seeking to automate the dangerous and repetitive work that humans would rather not do. They’re also betting that the narrative around workplace automation has shifted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, from worries that bots were on the march to replace people to current concerns about millions of unfilled jobs.
For Amazon, which is under fire from regulators for a high injury rate in its warehouses, humanoid bots could take the place of people in some of the most dangerous chokepoints. Washington state’s workplace safety regulator, which has imposed fines on the company for violations at a handful of warehouses, says moving boxes of inventory to or from conveyors—Digit’s wheelhouse—was among the most injury-prone jobs in its facilities. Amazon, which is appealing the fines, says it’s working to improve safety.
Vetterick, the Amazon manager, says rank-and-file employees were curious about Digit, but she declined to share any of their first impressions. Amazon is designing a virtual-reality simulation to test how Digit might fit in with human employees—and how workers will react to electronic colleagues. The company has also backed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of how automation will affect jobs. Amazon declined to specify when Digit or other humanoid bots might graduate to larger-scale testing.
Agility is working to make its bots more adaptable, packing in more battery life and nimbler movements. The company is also overhauling its command and control software to make it more user-friendly. Engineers have demonstrated how advances in AI might help Digit translate commands received in natural language into robotic actions. At a logistics trade show later this month, Agility plans to show off new hardware designed to let Digit grasp different types of bins.
“This logistics thing is just the beachhead market,” Hurst said on the podcast. “And over time then you’re getting into retail and stocking shelves and medical environments and logistics throughout hospitals and areas that are a lot more around people.”