Sanctuary AI announced that it will deliver its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility. Based in Canada, with car manufacturing facilities in Austria, Magna builds and assembles cars for a number of Europe’s leading car manufacturers, including Mercedes, Jaguar and BMW. As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots will be deployed.
The news follows similar deals announced by Figure and Apptronik, which are piloting their own humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes, respectively. Agility also announced a deal with Ford at CES in January 2020, though that deal found the US automaker exploring the use of Digit units for last-mile deliveries. Agility has since put that functionality on the back burner, focusing on warehouse deployments through partners like Amazon.
For its part, Magna invested in Sanctuary AI in 2021 — just as Elon Musk announced plans to build a humanoid robot to work in Tesla factories. The company would later name the system “Optimus”. Vancouver-based Sanctuary unveiled its own system, Phoenix, in May of last year. The system is 5’7″ (a fairly standard height for these machines) and weighs 155 lbs.
Phoenix isn’t Sanctuary’s first humanoid (an early model was deployed at a Canadian retailer), but it’s the first to walk on legs — this despite the fact that most available footage only highlights the system’s torso. The company has also focused some of its efforts on creating dexterous hands – an important addition if the system is expected to expand functionality beyond moving around cards.
Sanctuary is calling the pilot, “a multidisciplinary evaluation to improve the cost and scalability of robots using Magna’s automotive product portfolio, engineering and manufacturing capabilities. and a strategic equity investment from Magna.”
As always, these deals should be taken for what they are: pilots. It’s not exactly validation of the form factor and systems — that comes later if Magna gets what it’s looking for with the deal. This boils down to three big letters: ROI.
The company is not disclosing details about the number of robots, the length of the pilot, or even the specific factory where they will be developed.
