Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why the Digit Robot Finally Got a Head”.
This once headless robot is headless, no more say hello to the newest digit robot from agility robotics. You may remember previous versions of this bipedal robot built to help shoulder some of the workloads in warehouses and other industrial settings. My colleague Jesse covered digit back in 2021 click the link on your screen to check out his video, though technically not a humanoid robot digit is designed to fit into human environments. That’S why it’s about the size of a person standing at five foot. Nine digit officially went on sale back in 2020 and since then, we’ve seen a series of upgrades, but 2023 may be the year. We really get some face time with digit.
To learn more about the latest upgrades. I talked to agility CEO, Damon, Shelton and CTO Jonathan Hurst, who are at the promac conference in Chicago where they were officially introducing the new digit to the world. But every single piece about it inside and out has been redesigned and revised.
We’Re working towards a really reliable robot, that’s going to work for five years and 20 000 hours. Probably the most noticeable upgrade to most people is the addition of a head. You might be wondering what’s the point of adding ahead, the previous headless version of Digit didn’t have any problems navigating and locating boxes, and that comes down to addressing the concept of HRI or human robot interaction, and you really want it to be intuitive. You don’t want to have to train people about this.
Light means that, and this sound means that we have the opportunity of using body, language and expression to share intent from the robot, though digit C is using depth. Sensors that allow it to know where, to step and lidar to know where it actually is in space. You might notice those LED animated eyes.
They’Re, not just cosmetic they’re meant to make it easier for humans to understand what digit is doing or about to do so. Having the head on there and again not trying to copy the human necessarily but have something with a specific indicators that are natural to people, those pair of animated eyes, they tell it hey, I’m about to turn this way or I’m picking that up. You can really see ahead of time what the robot’s about to do side note.
The idea of giving digit ahead became a bit of a Hot Topic around the agility offices. I was in the camp of people. There was a little bit of a controversial internal discussion. There about half of us thought that it had a head uh and about half thought it didn’t, have a head uh in terms of the previous version, with the lidar all right. What the fam! Let’S settle this debate? Did the previous version of Digit have a head drop, a robot in the comments, if you think it’s a yes put a thumbs down in there, if it’s a no moving on the new digit also gets its first set of end effectors, more commonly known as hands. The previous version didn’t have the ability to grasp objects, but the new hands are designed for grabbing and moving the kind of plastic totes you’ll likely find in shipping warehouses. What’S the simplest thing we can do to really be effective here and then, if we must add a feature exactly why and what’s the minimalist future, we can to be General enough to do what we need to do in the world. So that’s what these hands are is an upgrade over what we had before to be able to control the pitch of the bins and to better balance it when the weight is moving around now, don’t expect this version of Digit to show up at work sites.
Quite yet, agility is still working with Partners to make improvements and upgrades, and the company hopes to start shipping and mass early in 2025.. There’S no price I get, but the previous version of Digit costs 250 000 dollars. Jonathan told me they expect that price to come down as they make refinements and scale up production. If you enjoyed this video, don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and check out my video on the humanoid robot that NASA is helping build by clicking here and, of course, subscribe to CNET for more with the future.
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