Agility Robotics co-founder admits Digit 5 is far from the robot he dreamed of
The Robot I Didn't Expect to Build
Jonathan Hurst, who co-founded Agility Robotics out of his Oregon State lab in 2015, reflects on the decade-long path from the ATRIAS research biped to Digit 5, a 23-kilogram-bin-lifting warehouse worker with a 90-minute battery and a 9-minute charge. He describes how commercial reality — safety certifications, customer deployments, and a new executive team — forced compromises in elegance and motion that once defined his vision, and why he now influences decisions rather than directing them.
The design process became a ruthless triage, with aesthetics and elegance of movement being delayed over and over again in favor of brutal functionality.
- elil17
I once again wonder why companies are building bipedal robots. Is it just for show?
If you want to build a general purpose industrial robot, surely a wheeled base with arms/hands is a better starting point. Cheaper, much easier to increase payload weight, and no risk of having it fall over onto someone.
If you want to build something which can navigate general terrain, then surely a robot dog is a better solution.
90% of use cases don't need both, and once you've solved building a general purpose industrial robot I promise you won't have trouble finding funding to add legs to it.
- WillAdams
>It needed to achieve the lifting limits recommended under the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health guidelines for human workers, which include repeatedly lifting 23-kg bins and reaching shelves 1.75 meters high. Digit is designed to perform tasks like these for 20 hours a day—something no human can do.
I think that rather underestimates what people can and have done (cue John Henry story).
I worked in an Amazon warehouse for two different stints:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
and it was rather like a gym membership which I couldn't skip out on (glances at exercise equipment cluttering living space) and during which I could ponder life choices and consequences while wishing there was a soundtrack/music.
That said, this sort of thing, LLMs/AIs and data centers, and so forth feel like a perfect storm leading up to singularity (as envisioned by some optimistic science fiction authors) or something far worse, cue Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":
- GabeIsko
This is exactly why I didn't want to work for Agile when I was invited. This stuff is going to get crushed in the market by cheap AGVs and good systems integration.
It was very sad to watch the ambitions of excited robotics researchers turn towards making what are essentially digital slaves. I am not saying that manufacturing or logistics couldn't, or even shouldn't be automated. But the true factories and distribution centers of the future will have to fundamentally rethink what productivity and coordinated work looks like, including having a greater imagination about work and employment.
Mimicking the human form inelegantly is not going to cut it, let alone reduce labor costs. I am all for the research, but the dream of replacing bin pickers with humanoid robots is cynical and hopeless.
- padolsey
> When Digit detects an approaching human, the robot will lower itself to the floor and cut power to its motors. Agility believes this is the only near-term approach to verifiably reduce risk when the robot is working near people.
I did not intend for a picture of a robot in a factory environment to make me go awwww :[
- bambax
> filling the need for labor in jobs that are too physically stressful or too dull for humans to want to do
That's a disturbing sentence. Most jobs are "dull". Peolpe work not to fill their otherwise empty existence, but in order to earn money. Dullness could be solved by making the tasks less dull, or empowering employees (even if the term has been abused).
The sentence is also dishonest. Businesses want robots to save costs and increase profits, not to make their employees happier.