Agility Robotics chief technology officer Pras Velagapudi told the Wall Street Journal, “We’ve been trying to figure out how not just to make a humanoid robot, but make a humanoid robot that does useful work,” and that is the tricky bit.
Agility already has hundreds of its Digit robots working with customers, including Amazon and auto-parts firm Schaeffler. The bots do the unglamorous grunt work, like picking up items and moving them around a warehouse.
As Digit and its peers find small, real niches, analysts and tech execs are talking up a looming wave of humanoid robots.
Velagapudi points out that getting a human-shaped robot to lug boxes around an industrial site is one thing, “but building a robot butler is beyond the industry’s current capabilities.”
He reckons today’s machines are still too unreliable for complex work that does not happen in a tightly controlled space.
Safety is another wallet-melter, even when the robot is not a two-tonne industrial arm swinging about at speed. McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar said companies dodge deployments mainly because of installation costs, not because the robot itself is pricey.
Kelkar said, “For every $100 spent on deploying robots today, only around $20 is the actual machine, with the rest being spent on equipment and systems designed to protect humans from injury.”
In theory, smaller humanoids should need fewer fortress-like safeguards. Tesla’s Optimus stands about 5 feet 8 inches and weighs 125 pounds, while Unitree’s G1 is smaller at 4 feet and 77 pounds.
Kelkar still thinks the leap from tidy demo clips to dependable reality is huge. He said, “We’re doing a big extrapolation from watching videos of robots doing laundry to a butler in my house that can do everything.”
At the Humanoids Summit in California, billed as the world’s largest gathering devoted to the subject, early prototypes looked more like controlled stunts than finished products. Gatlin Robotics chief executive Isaac Qureshi put on a virtual-reality headset to steer a robot meant to clean offices, then trailed it as it tried to scrub a brick wall.
Qureshi said, “Slowly, we’re going to teach the Gatlin robot more things, like starting with dusting, surface cleaning, trash bins and then the toilet. The toilet’s a big North Star.”
On stage, founder after founder tried to tamp down the froth, which is not the usual vibe at a hype conference. Weave Robotics chief executive Kaan Dogrusoz, a former engineer at the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple, said, “There’s a lot of great technological work happening, a lot of great talent working on these, but they are not yet well-defined products.”
Dogrusoz argued the premise is sound but the tech is not there yet, comparing it to Job’s Mob’s infamous Newton handheld computer. “Full bipedal humanoids are the Newtons of our times,” Dogrusoz said.
