Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just down the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start producing its Optimus robots this year.

Tesla is increasingly focusing on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be “the biggest product ever” once it “becomes useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.”

While Agility doesn’t have the capital of Tesla, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot already generates revenue by transporting bins and bins in manufacturing and warehouse environments for customers such as Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company says it has secured $300 million in contractor orders for its robots.

“It’s great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because Agility was alone for a long time, and it’s good to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We are commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their security barriers, their regulations, compliance, connecting to their IT infrastructure, connecting to their warehouse management system.”

Agility did not disclose how many Digits it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. For example, the company has said that Digits has 100,000 moved baking at a GXO logistics facility.

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse merger that is expected to create the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public market later this year. Agility, founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to walk safely on two legs, is trying to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI-inspired robot startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company or Sunday Robotics.

While the advent of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advances in robot behavior, Agility takes a hands-on approach to autonomy.

“When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don’t want the anti-lock brake controller to be under AI control,” Damion Shelton, co-founder and chairman of Agility, told TechCrunch. “The analogy with humanoids is that all security stuff has to follow a path that isn’t generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your security stack.”

What AI does do is deliver on the promise of scale.

“One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] When we asked how we were going to approach coding applications for the robot, we didn’t really have a good answer,” says Shelton. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing far exceeds the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI definitively answers that question.”

The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in discussions with the company about deploying Digit, and the new facility will be where the 6-foot-tall robot learns new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field.

Unlike many of the newer entrants to the humanoid space, Agility has no plans to offer humanoid robots for the home anytime soon. It’s a view that echoes that of most independent robotics experts, who believe that today’s most powerful robots are not safe enough for consumer use. Digit currently operates in a human-free space, but version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will have the ability to sense humans and won’t need to be kept in a robot-only zone.

Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst said there is enough work to keep Agility busy in manufacturing and logistics alone.

“Let’s start with the bins and bins, and then we’ll do the picking and the packing,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “And then let’s start working on cardboard, which is very difficult, and loading and unloading tractors and things like that. OK, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”