Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard
Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard
Agility Robotics 在特斯拉的“后院”插旗
Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year. Agility Robotics 正在加利福尼亚州弗里蒙特市开设一座占地 60,000 平方英尺的工厂，用于训练其人形机器人。该工厂距离特斯拉预计今年开始生产 Optimus 机器人的工厂仅有几分钟车程。
Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be “the biggest product ever” once it’s “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.” While Agility doesn’t have Tesla’s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. 特斯拉正日益押注于 Optimus。埃隆·马斯克最近表示，他预计一旦 Optimus 在“明年某个时候在特斯拉之外也能发挥作用”，它将成为“有史以来最伟大的产品”。虽然 Agility 没有特斯拉那样的资本，但它拥有一款已经在现实世界中发挥作用的机器人——Digit。
The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company says it has secured $300 million in contract orders for its robots. 这款机器人已经在为亚马逊 (Amazon)、GXO、舍弗勒 (Schaeffler) 和丰田加拿大汽车制造公司 (Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada) 等客户搬运周转箱和料箱，并以此创造收入。该公司表示，已获得价值 3 亿美元的机器人合同订单。
“It’s great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone, and it’s good to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system.” “很高兴 [特斯拉] 和我们在同一个地区，因为长期以来 Agility 一直是孤军奋战，有人加入人形机器人领域是件好事，”首席执行官 Peggy Johnson 在接受 TechCrunch 采访时表示。“我们已经实现了商业化。我们现在知道如何进入这些设施，并达到它们的安全标准、监管要求、合规性，以及如何接入它们的 IT 基础设施和仓库管理系统。”
Agility hasn’t disclosed how many Digits that it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company has said, for example, that Digits have moved 100,000 totes at a GXO logistics facility. Agility 尚未披露其制造或部署了多少台 Digit，但外部观察人士估计，已有数十台机器人在试点或创收项目中投入使用。例如，该公司曾表示，Digit 机器人在一家 GXO 物流中心已经搬运了 10 万个周转箱。
Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse-merger that is expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to safely walk on two legs, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI-inspired robotic startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics. Johnson 目前正带领 Agility 进行反向合并，预计这将使其成为今年晚些时候公开市场上第一家纯人形机器人公司。Agility 由一群研究人员于 2015 年创立，他们开发了让机器人能够安全双足行走的新技术。目前，Agility 正试图利用其领先优势，与 Figure、1X、the Bot Company 或 Sunday Robotics 等新一代受 AI 启发的机器人初创公司竞争。
While the arrival of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advancements in robotic behavior, Agility is taking a practical 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 under AI control,” Agility co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton told TechCrunch. “The analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that’s not generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack.” 虽然基于 Transformer 的神经网络的出现推动了大型语言模型 (LLM) 的发展，也预示着机器人行为将取得重大进步，但 Agility 在自主性方面采取了务实的方法。“以自动驾驶汽车为例（非人形机器人），你肯定不希望防抱死制动控制器由 AI 控制，”Agility 联合创始人兼董事长 Damion Shelton 对 TechCrunch 说。“人形机器人的类比是，所有安全相关的功能都必须通过非生成式 AI 的路径来处理，对吧？你不会想在安全架构上搞什么‘创新’。”
What AI does do, however, is deliver on the promise of scale. “One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] asked us how we were going to go about coding applications for the robot, we didn’t really have a good answer,” Shelton said. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far larger than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI answers that question definitively.” 然而，AI 确实兑现了规模化的承诺。“[担任 Agility 董事会成员的 Quicktime 发明者 Bruce Leak] 第一次问我们打算如何为机器人编写应用程序时，我们并没有很好的答案，”Shelton 说。“你能想象机器人做的事情的数量，远多于能为机器人编程的工程师数量。而生成式 AI 明确地回答了这个问题。”
The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in talks with the company about deploying Digit, and the new facility will be where the six-foot-tall robot learns new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field. 新设施旨在加速公司的机器人部署。Johnson 表示，已有 30 多家客户正在与公司洽谈部署 Digit 的事宜。新设施将成为这个六英尺高的机器人学习新技能的地方，其环境与它在实际应用中将遇到的环境相似。
Unlike many of the newer entrants to the humanoid space, Agility isn’t planning to offer in-home humanoid robots anytime soon. It’s a view that jibes with that of most independent robotics experts, who believe today’s most powerful robots aren’t safe enough for consumer use. Digit operates in a human-free space right now, but the 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. 与许多人形机器人领域的新进入者不同，Agility 并不打算在短期内提供家用人形机器人。这一观点与大多数独立机器人专家的看法一致，他们认为当今最强大的机器人对于消费者使用来说还不够安全。Digit 目前在无人区域运行，但预计将于今年秋季发布的第 5 代版本将具备感知人类的能力，无需再被限制在机器人专用区域内。
Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst said there is plenty of work to keep Agility busy in manufacturing and logistics alone. “Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “And then let’s like start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Okay, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.” 联合创始人兼首席机器人官 Jonathan Hurst 表示，仅在制造和物流领域，就有足够多的工作让 Agility 忙碌。“让我们从料箱和周转箱开始，然后进行拣选和配料，”Hurst 对 TechCrunch 说。“然后我们开始处理纸板（这非常困难），以及装卸拖车等等。好了，现在我们拥有了 1 亿台机器人，你懂的？那将是一家万亿美元的公司。”