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 — 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 — 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.
END TIMES PROPHECY WATCH 
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