Maybe a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Convention Center will be filled with humanoid robots during Modex week. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone in the supply chain exhibit. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start against competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X and Apptronik. This time last year at Modex (the Chicago version of the conference), Digit had something of an industrial automation party. A series of bipedal robots moved on a nearby conveyor belt at selected times of the week.
This week in Atlanta, a rotating cast of eight Figures works every day from the show’s opening to closing. This time, however, the blue and silver robots are doing something a little different. Demonstrations feature line-side refueling and tote retrieval with a flow rack designed for automotive manufacturing. Agility tells TechCrunch that it’s currently working with automotive customers — though it hasn’t yet released names.
Ford was famously among the early proponents of Agility, announcing a partnership way back at CES 2020. Ultimately, plans to put Digit to work on last-mile deliveries fell through as the company turned its attention to the near-term of warehouse staffing. This turned out to be a smart move as the workforce figures have yet to bounce back post-COVID. Former Agility CEO Damion Shelton told me last week that the last mile is still on the table, but there’s more than enough to focus on in the warehouse and manufacturing areas to keep the company busy.
Building a C-suite has been an important part of the company’s growth over the past 12 months. Co-founders Shelton and Jonathan Hurst have switched roles, from CEO and CTO to president and head of robotics, respectively. A week ago today, former Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took over as CEO from Shelton. Last year, the company named Fetch founder and CEO Melonee Wise as CTO and brought in former Apple and Ford executive Aindrea Campbell as COO.
Leadership changes indicate that a company is taking commercialization more seriously. They also put Agility in a rarefied atmosphere among top robotics companies, with women in five of nine C-suite roles.
Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to hit “high double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by the end of the year. This week at Modex, the company took the wraps off Agility Arc, its fleet development and management 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 task assignment,” Wise tells TechCrunch. “But it also has the other aspects you need to deploy and configure a system and remotely monitor and support the system. It’s a single pane of glass that lets you do basically anything related to managing a fleet of digits.”
Johnson, who previously steered Magic Leap’s shaky pivot to the business, says the new enterprise software has given her confidence that her new company is on a firmer footing than the previous one.
“The thing that was really encouraging when I learned about the new cloud automation system is that it’s such a sign of the maturity of the company,” he says. “This isn’t just a device, it’s something that’s meant to be embedded. So often at [Johnson’s former employer] Microsoft, that would be the starting point. You would have some isolated system here that wasn’t integrated with everything else and wasn’t delivering the value it could. So the fact that it will be able to integrate with WMS systems and other things that the company already uses is a big burden for them.”
Image Credits: Brian Heater
For Johnson, Modex was a huge learning experience. He spoke to us last week from Japan, where he had recently competed in the Tokyo Marathon. He hopped on a plane back to the United States over the weekend specifically to get a firsthand look at the supply chain/supply support world he’s now a part of. “I wanted to make sure I was here to see not only the customers, but also the environment that the devices work in. I’m going to spend a lot of time walking around today and immersing myself in that.”
Johnson’s main proposition as CEO is a fast track to ROI. This can be achieved in large part by 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 make the leap. Customers can now pilot these systems without having to worry about huge upfront costs.
It is these customers who ultimately shape Digit’s future. The model on the floor demonstrating an automotive workflow has a new pair of end-effectors. Instead of the wing-like appendages the company has introduced, this Digit has its own four digits on each hand, with two pairs of hooked fingers pointing in opposite directions. However, this is not dexterous mobile handling. Instead, it’s designed to do what Digit has been doing all along: carry bags.
The bags here are quite wide, though (as is customary in the automotive line), prohibiting the robot from hugging it with one arm on each side. Instead, operators grab the front of the totes. This method also provides a firmer grip on a box that often has heavy, untied items rolling around inside.
In the not-too-distant future, Wise envisions a version of Digit that can swap out its end-operators as needed.
“When you look specifically at the end effector, there’s about 60 years of prior art,” he says. “All [Modex], if you look around, all these robot arms have different end effectors. This is a very well understood thing. There is something called the “ultimate arm toolbox”. They are interchangeable. What we’re going to drive as a product is to have interchangeable arm tool tips and eventually make that an automated process.”
In what could be perceived as a dig at some of the humanoid robots, Shelton notes, “but interestingly, 0% of the solutions are five-finger, 27-degree-of-freedom hands.” He adds, “there have been some of our competitors who have said they use a five-fingered hand basically as a branding exercise.”
As for what the competition should focus on, Wise believes Agility’s peers should focus on security — a huge concern when introducing new technologies into a warehouse environment. “We need, collectively as an industry, to 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 need to focus on the project they are pursuing. “Stay focused on the here and now and what can be done,” he says. “Everyone needs a road map, but stay focused and prove it.”
