Humanoid robots have arrived, but they are awkward. Do we really require them: Building a humanoid robot that is also useful is a decades-old engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction.
While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked a new wave of investment in the quest to create a humanoid, most current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a few startups from persevering.
“We’re not going to start from scratch and say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to make a robot look like a person,'” said Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics. “We’re trying to make robots that can operate in human spaces.”
Do we even require humanoids? Hurst emphasizes that Agility’s warehouse robot Digit is human-centric rather than humanoid, a distinction meant to emphasize what it does rather than what it aspires to be.
For the time being, it only picks up and moves tote bins. Amazon announced in October that it will begin testing Digits for use in its warehouses, and Agility opened a factory in Oregon to mass produce them in September.
Digit has a head with cameras, sensors, and animated eyes, as well as a torso that serves as its engine. It has two arms and two legs, but its legs are more bird-like than human, with inverted knees that resemble digitigrade animals like birds, cats, and dogs that walk on their toes rather than flat feet.
Rival robot makers, such as Figure AI, take a more purist approach to the idea that only true humanoids can navigate workplaces, homes, and a society designed for humans. Figure also intends to begin with a relatively simple use case, such as in a retail warehouse, but aims for a commercial robot that can be “iterated on like an iPhone” to perform multiple tasks to replace humans as birth rates decline globally.