This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robot that was powered by hydraulics.
Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity.
Its new Atlas robot is leaner, and appears to have improved range-of-motion.
Size and ability to contort and maneuver are not cosmetic elements to a humanoid robot — they can unlock new use cases and possible work environments.
Happily for those of us who want a domestic robot to handle household chores and hold our hands whilst we cry, there are other startups working on the humanoid robot project.
Mentee Robotics hasn’t been in stealth, exactly.
The Israeli firm caught a small wave of press at the tail end of 2022, following Tesla’s initial humanoid robotics announcement.
Even so, the firm caught some headlines because its co-founder and chair, Amnon Shashua, founded Mobileye and the well-funded AI firm, AI21 Labs.
On Wednesday, however, the company offered up a glimpse of Menteebot, its own stab at the rapidly growing humanoid category.
In fact, this is one of those spots where the precise definition of what constitutes a humanoid system gets blurred.
Now that humanoids are all the rage in the robotics industry, Boston Dynamics on Tuesday officially retired theirs.
Boston Dynamics has been focused on commercializing technologies for a number of years now.
Boston Dynamics was, of course, well ahead of the current humanoid robotics curve.
Another wrinkle in today’s news is that, as of February, Boston Dynamics was still showcasing Atlas’ capabilities.
Meantime, in lieu of a gold watch, Boston Dynamics is offering up a video featuring some of Atlas’ greatest hits and most spectacular falls.
Sanctuary AI announced that it will be delivering its humanoid robot to a Magna manufacturing facility.
As is often the nature of these deals, the parties have not disclosed how many of Sanctuary AI’s robots will be deployed.
The news follows similar deals announced by Figure and Apptronik, which are piloting their own humanoid systems with BMW and Mercedes, respectively.
For its part, Magna invested in Sanctuary AI back in 2021 — right around the time Elon Musk announced plans to build a humanoid robot to work in Tesla factories.
The company would later dub the system “Optimus.” Vancouver-based Sanctuary unveiled its own system, Phoenix, back in May of last year.
It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans.
For a while now, Collaborative Robotics founder Brad Porter has eschewed robots that look like people.
As the two-year-old startup’s name implies, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot for short) is interested in the ways in which humans and robots will collaborate, moving forward.
When his run with the company ended in summer 2020, he was leading the retail giant’s industrial robotics team.
AI will, naturally, be foundational to the company’s promise of “human problem solving,” while the move away from the humanoid form factor is a bid, in part, to reduce the cost of entry for deploying these systems.
Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece.
Keeping things in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Jetson Thor, a new computer designed specifically for running simulation workflows, generative AI models and more for the humanoid form factor.
Nvidia notes of the new silicon:The SoC includes a next-generation GPU based on NVIDIA Blackwell architecture with a transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating point AI performance to run multimodal generative AI models like GR00T.
Naturally, Nvidia wants a piece of the action.
The next several years will present a fascinating race for market share between humanoids and mobile manipulators, and Nvidia wants a piece of all of that action.
Pilot season has officially begun for the world of humanoid robotics.
Last year, Amazon began testing Agility’s Digit robots in select fulfillment centers, while this January, Figure announced a deal with BMW.
Now Apptronik is getting in on the action, courtesy of a partnership with Mercedes-Benz.
Apptronik can demonstrate clear interest from a leading automotive name, while Mercedes signals to customers and shareholders alike that it’s looking to the future.
Apptronik is a University of Austin spinout best known for its work on NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid robot.
It’s not a flat-out refutation of the form factor, so much as an acknowledgement that — in spite of investor enthusiasm — it’s not the ideal tool for every job.
This week’s Modex supply chain show inAtlanta told its own story — one populated by very few humanoids.
A number of the players I spoke with continued to express skepticism around the widespread adoption of humanoid robots in the workplace.
I heard very few outright rejections of the humanoid form factor.
These instances, which now require human intervention, could be the ideal scenario for humanoids, whether operating autonomously or teleoperated, as in the case of Reflex, the other humanoid robotics firm present at Modex.
Agility’s Digit wasn’t the only humanoid holding court at Modex in Atlanta this week.
On the opposite end of the Georgia World Congress Center, Reflex Robotics, a younger and smaller startup, was drawing its own crowd.
Passersby requested something from the Reflex robot, and it spring into action, grabbing the item off the shelf (it didn’t hurt that the company was giving out free food and beverage).
The system has a wheeled base, which is perfectly effective for navigating these kinds of layouts.
He adds that the current timeline involves having 10 to 20 Reflex robots in the world, followed by “hundreds” next year.
The loneliness of the robotic humanoid Humanoid robots are all the rage, but Agility’s Digit was a singular presence at this year’s Modex conferencePerhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex.
A line of the bipedal robots were moving totes to a nearby conveyor belt at select times throughout the week.
This week in Atlanta, a rotating cast of eight Digits are working each day from show opening to close.
Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to hit “high double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by end of year.
This week at Modex, the company took the wraps off Agility Arc, deployment and fleet management software for Digit.
