Amazon’s new factory workers don’t complain about long hours or poor working conditions.
Built by Carnegie Mellon University alumni, the Agility Robotics humanoids, called Digit, can pick up packages and walk around warehouses on their own two legs. They’re part of a push by the online shopping giant to make deliveries more efficient.
“New robotic solutions … will support workplace safety and help Amazon deliver to customers faster,” the company said in a recent blog post.
Amazon led the charge toward warehouse automation with the purchase of Kiva Systems in 2012. It now deploys 750,000 wheeled mobile robots across its warehouse network.
But Digit would be the company’s first on two feet.
The 5-foot, 9-inch bots were designed around Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards and built to move like humans so that they can work in existing factories, said Agility CEO Damion Shelton. To recharge, the robots initially sat in bays that resembled airport massage chairs.
Image DescriptionAmazon is testing a new walking humanoid developed Agility Robotics, a team led by Carnegie Mellon University alumni. Agility plans to make 10,000 Digit units each year. Amazon is currently using the bots in a testing capacity but sees “a big opportunity to scale.” (Courtesy of Amazon)
“Now, because of where the battery pack is, it actually clicks back into the charge dock,” Shelton said. “I really loved the airport massage chair model, but you know, engineering realities taking precedence.”
Both Amazon and Agility say robots won’t replace human jobs. Digit is designed to work alongside humans and replace the most mundane tasks, freeing up people to do more thought-heavy tasks.
“Despite the logistics industry pushing out a non-trivial amount of robots in the past 10 years, not only has there not been any job loss associated with it, the number of unfilled jobs has actually increased,” Shelton said.
Agility plans to make 10,000 Digit units each year. Amazon is currently using the bots in a testing capacity but sees “a big opportunity to scale.”
Shelton started Agility in 2015 alongside Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Hurst. They met as CMU graduate students in the early 2000s.
“The whole train that ultimately led to what became Digit has its roots back to Jonathan being in grad school at CMU,” said Shelton, who remembers helping Hurst with his computer science homework as the student helped him with his mechanical work.
Hurst went on to create Oregon State University’s first robotics lab. Shelton taught at the University of Pittsburgh before leaving the conceptual world of academia to build real-world products, first at threeRivers 3D and now at Agility.
Their synergy led to the first commercially available bipedal robot, Cassie, in 2017. Three years later, Agility started selling Digit to Ford.
Similar humanoids have been developed by Boston Dynamics and Tesla, but neither have found broad commercial use. New founders like Brett Adcock, of electric aviation company Archer, are now getting bipedal robots up on two legs in under a year.
Shelton said the various companies don’t necessarily learn from each other’s approach.
“We’re comfortable, frankly, with our own tech,” he said.
But together, the buzz they create can be helpful.
“This is such a large market, it’s not like any individual company is going to dominate 100% of it,” Shelton said. “Agility is obviously the first to market, and we’re quite confident with where we are. But we’re also happy that there’s more broad interest in this space.”
Agility is headquartered in Corvallis, Ore., but Shelton and a team of about 45 employees work from its second-largest office in Pittsburgh. The company received development funding last year from Amazon’s $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Amazon also backed a CMU team in 2015 that built the four-legged “CHIMP” robot, which could drive, climb stairs and operate power tools — all facets of a competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Hurst led a team at Oregon State University that also responded to the challenge, building the ostrich-like ATRIAS, a direct predecessor to Cassie.
Still, years later, Shelton said humanoids remain an “unmet gap for automation.”
“The main argument for robots that are about the size and shape of a person is not so much that they’re cool — although they are — but rather that our world is set up around us,” he said.
Image DescriptionAmazon is testing a new walking humanoid developed Agility Robotics, a team led by Carnegie Mellon University alumni. Agility plans to make 10,000 Digit units each year. Amazon is currently using the bots in a testing capacity but sees “a big opportunity to scale.” (Courtesy of Amazon)
There is still a ways to go before Digit finds its way outside of warehouses, where safety would be a significant concern.
The robots are fully autonomous and even walk themselves back to charging stations when it’s time to refuel. But they are trained on a limited world of smooth floors and standard-sized bins.
Pittsburgh’s sidewalks would pose an entirely different challenge, Shelton said.
“It is literally possible to have a CAD model of every single plastic bin in the entire world,” he said. “Whereas in Pittsburgh, God knows what database you’d have to have.
“The reality is the robots are not self-aware, they’re not even using large language models right now,” he said, referring to the building blocks of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
Chris Atkeson, a CMU robotics professor known for creating the inflatable technology that inspired Disney’s “Big Hero 6” movie, said Agility’s recent success is part of a broader upswing in robotics development that is blossoming nationwide and in Pittsburgh.
“There is a lot of work going on at CMU and at local companies, given that there is a big overlap between developing brains for autonomous cars and for humanoids,” he said, noting that Tesla loves to highlight the synergy.
The university’s work on humanoid bodies currently focuses on hands, skin, control and superhuman sensing, Atkeson said.
As for Agility’s plans beyond Amazon, Shelton said they are launching a partnership program that will allow large manufacturing and logistics companies to purchase a Digit workforce.
Down the road, Agility is considering an hourly subscription model to help small and midsized companies that are typically more impacted by workforce shortages.
