SUMNER, Wash. — Sitting down recently with Agility Robotics executives to discuss the company’s bipedal humanoid robot, Digit, it seemed important to first clarify the issue of pronouns. Should we refer to this robot as he or she?
As it turns out, the answer was neither.
“We use it for Digit,” said Damion Shelton, the CEO and co-founder of the Corvallis, Ore.-based company. Agility used she for its prior robot, Cassie, but ultimately decided it wasn’t right to assign a gender to a piece of technology.
It might seem like a trivial distinction, but it was a relevant question to ask. After watching a duo of Digits at work last week inside an Amazon warehouse south of Seattle — looking closer to human than any previous robot I’d seen at one of the e-commerce giant’s facilities — the temptation to anthropomorphize them was strong.
Shelton and Liz Clinkenbeard, Agility’s VP of communications, reoriented my thinking.
“It’s not a person,” Clinkenbeard explained. “It doesn’t have a gender. It’s a machine.”
But it’s a machine designed for work that people would otherwise do.
Amazon is testing Digit for tote consolidation, a process that involves organizing and repositioning storage containers after all the inventory has been removed. Digit can autonomously sense, grasp, and move bulk objects such as these totes, while navigating an environment originally designed for humans.
Digit’s head includes internal antennas and LED eyes that blink to indicate which way it’s turning. The robot has multiple arrays of cameras and sensors, and a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system to scan its environment.
It has two robotic arms. Its legs may look like those of a large bird, such as an ostrich or crane, but the company says they reflect decades of research into how humans and animals walk, allowing it to navigate a variety of terrains.
Amazon previously invested in Agility, an Oregon State University spinoff, through its Industrial Innovation Fund, a billion-dollar venture capital fund that backs different forms of supply chain technology. Amazon’s testing of Digit, announced last week, is a milestone for Agility, and for humanoid robots in commercial environments.
Digit goes to work
Seeing the humanoid robots in action, it was difficult not to think of them as the physical manifestation of the age-old concern about robots taking jobs from people.
But the reality is that there aren’t enough people to do these jobs. And the bigger point, as Shelton explained, is that there are better jobs for people to do.
“There’s an awful lot of what roboticists would call dull, dirty, and dangerous work that people probably shouldn’t be doing. It’s either very repetitive, or very hard, or both. And it just causes wear and tear,” Shelton said. “The evolution of labor has been towards higher-skill, lower-risk jobs, and we see robots as helping that process to continue in the modern world.”
Agility recently announced plans to mass-produce Digit robots at a facility in Salem, Ore., that ultimately will be able to produce more than 10,000 robots a year.
Reacting to videos of Digit in online forums last week, some Amazon fulfillment center employees commented on the robot’s relatively slow pace of work, observing that they could complete the task much faster.
“Because it is made to work in spaces built for people, Digit is intentionally designed to walk at a speed of about 1.5 m/s, which is close to the average preferred walking speed of humans,” explained Clinkenbeard, Agility’s VP of communications. “That said, we’re continually working to improve motion quality, meaning over time Digit will take fewer steps to do the same motions, which could make the cycle times faster even though the hardware doesn’t move faster.”
‘Very early stages of testing’
The tote consolidation that the robots are doing for Amazon is usually accomplished with a system of conveyors and human labor, but there are some sites where the available space can’t accommodate conveyors, or the totes might be too far from conveyors to make it practical, said Emily Vetterick, director of engineering for Amazon Robotics.
“Amazon has a very rigorous product development cycle, and we are at the very early stages of testing,” Vetterick told reporters during a demo of Digit last week. “We start from very small tests, and we incrementally build confidence that we’re solving the right problems for our customers, and improving the employee experience.”
After watching the robots in action, I asked Vetterick how much of this testing is about seeing how employees react to bipedal humanoid robots in their midst.
Employee feedback is part of the process, she said, explaining that one benefit of the facility we were in, Amazon’s BFI1 warehouse in Sumner, is the fact that it’s both a research-and-development facility and a working fulfillment center. Amazon went through a similar testing process with other robots, including Proteus, its first autonomous mobile robotic platform that can operate in and around human workers.
“Our development process does include employee feedback,” Vetterick said. “Proteus and other technologies really piloted a lot of different ways to get feedback, both positive and negative, that transform our design process.”
Realizing that I was dancing around the issue, I followed up with a more blunt form of the question: “Are you concerned that employees will find this creepy?”
“You know, it is a really interesting form factor,” Vetterick responded. “And that’s why we test, to get that feedback.”
