Agility Robotics will soon be able to produce 10,000 bipedal humanoid robots a year. When I spoke with Agility CEO Damion Shelton and CTO Melonee Wise on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, they also claimed that the company creates jobs rather than taking them from people.
“If you start with an environment designed for people, a robot that can easily move through that environment will end up with two arms and two legs,” Shelton says, explaining why Digit has a pair of arms and legs in order to be effective at this. Its storage tasks. It turns out that a lot of the design standards that went into designing Digit are actually taken directly from the closest OSHA manual.
Agility launched the robot a few months ago. Making a humanoid robot with arms and legs makes sense, but the company also decided to add a pair of eyes. . . . They’re not used to look around — there are a bunch of sensors on the robot that take care of that — but instead, the controversial decision helps the robot communicate.
“Having the eyes gives you a sense of where the robot is going,” Wise says. “It helps direct the human’s gaze to areas of the robot that are important for them to pay attention to — for example, the LED ring on either side of the head. And things like that so people can see that Digit is doing well and excited to be in the world.”
The robot can carry about 35 pounds (~12 kg) and can reach about 4.5 feet (~1.4 meters). He. She could The team says it reaches even higher — in fact, the arms will likely reach seven to eight feet, judging from onstage demos, but the robot rarely needs to, given warehouse designs. Humans aren’t expected to pick up boxes from seven feet in the air, nor are robots.
“OSHA applies to worker safety. And if a robot is in its environment, in a person’s environment, that’s the worker. So the robot has to adhere to safety standards related to that worker. Now, if workers leave the entire facility,” Wise said. “All of a sudden, it doesn’t solve all the problems because eventually someone has to come in and fix the robot.” “If one day we magically get to the point where robots are repairing robots, the turtles will be along the way, and then we’ll be fine. But until that point, OSHA will likely be involved because at some point, someone will be maintaining the robot.
No weapons or explosives. . .
Agility Robotics has written an open letter to the robotics industry — along with Open Robotics, Boston Dynamics and others — saying that General purpose robots should not be armed. Isaac Asimov He would be proud. We talked a little bit about why that is.
“We started talking to [Boston Dynamics] About a year and a half ago, we talked about what we wanted to see the industry evolve into. “The thing that we’re all very sensitive to is the desire to not have a robot hurt someone, whether accidentally or intentionally,” Shelton said. “The easy thing to cut short is not to intentionally harm people. There’s no reason to do that. It doesn’t help the industry. And if our goal is to have robots actually improve the quality of life, it’s very difficult to see a world where people are intentionally harmed on this roadmap.” .
The way this works for Agility is a clause in the user agreement that ensures end users cannot deploy their bots to harm people.
“We include an end-user statement with all of our robot sales and define that contractually, so it’s not just about not attaching a weapon to the robot,” Shelton said. “He does not use the robot in any way that could harm people or animals or even pose a threat.”
They won’t take your job either
Perhaps most surprising was the team’s insistence that while there’s a very popular idea about robots taking people’s jobs, these robots won’t do that.
“When I started with Fetch Robotics in 2014, there was a job gap of 600,000 jobs. That meant they couldn’t find 600,000 people to do the jobs in logistics and manufacturing,” Wise said. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse. : “The gap widened to a million people. So, the whole time we deployed robots at Fetch Robotics, we never replaced a person because every time we were trying to close the gap.
The argument is that the workforce is aging and people don’t want to do manual labor.