Ten years ago, at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trial event near Miami, I watched the most advanced humanoid robots ever built struggle their way through a scenario inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A team of experienced engineers controlled each robot, and overhead safety tethers kept them from falling over. The robots had to demonstrate mobility, sensing, and manipulation—which, with painful slowness, they did. These robots were clearly research projects, but DARPA has a history of catalyzing technology with a long-term view. The DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges for autonomous vehicles, in 2005 and 2007, formed the foundation for today’s autonomous taxis. So, after DRC ended in 2015 with several of the robots successfully completing the entire final scenario, the obvious question was: When would humanoid robots make the transition from research project to a commercial product? The answer seems to be 2024, when a handful of well-funded companies will be deploying their robots in commercial pilot projects to figure out whether humanoids are really ready to get to work. One of the robots that made an appearance at the DRC Finals in 2015 was called ATRIAS, developed by Jonathan Hurst at the Oregon State University Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. In 2015, Hurst cofounded Agility Robotics to turn ATRIAS into a human-centric, multipurpose, and practical robot called Digit. Approximately the same size as a human, Digit stands 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet, 8 inches), weighs 65 kilograms (about 140 pounds), and can lift 16 kg (about 35 pounds). Agility is now preparing to produce a commercial version of Digit at massive scale, and the company sees its first opportunity in the logistics industry, where it will start doing some of the jobs where humans are essentially acting like robots already.
Full feature : The role of humanoid robots in 2024.
