A factory planning to pump out 10,000 two-legged robots a year is taking shape in Salem, Oregon — the better to help Amazon and other giant companies with dangerous hauling, lifting, and moving.
Agility Robotics says that its RoboFab manufacturing facility will be the first to mass-produce humanoid robots, which could be nimbler and more versatile than their existing industrial counterparts.
Beijing recently announced a goal of mass-producing humanoid robots by 2025. Agility Robotics, which makes a bot named Digit that’s being tested by Amazon, plans to open RoboFab early next year, inaugurating what CEO Damion Shelton calls “the world’s first purpose-built humanoid robot factory.”
“We’ve placed a very high priority on just getting robots out there as fast as possible,” Shelton, who’s also a co-founder, tells Axios.
“Our big plan is that we want to get to general-purpose humanoids as soon as we can.”
There’s a growing backlog of orders for Digit, which the company says is the first commercially available human-shaped robot designed for warehouse work.
Agility has produced about 100 robots since its founding in 2016, and plans to move Digit production from its Tangent, Oregon headquarters to the more spacious 70,000-square-foot RoboFab facility in the coming months.
At first, production will be in the hundreds, but eventually RoboFab is “going to have a significantly larger capacity of 10,000 robots per year, peak,” Shelton says.
Companies that buy into Agility’s Partner Program — which gives them input into Digit’s capabilities, based on their own logistics needs — will get their robots delivered in 2024, ahead of broader delivery in 2025.
