Name: Brainstorm Tech 2024: How To Build A Better ‘Bot
Uploaded: 2024-07-16
Duration: 18 min 24 s
Description: Peggy Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Agility Robotics Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune

Peggy Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, Agility Robotics Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune

Brainstorm Tech 2024: How To Build A Better ‘Bot

Conferences

A lot of people want to work with robots. That's probably maybe a good start for you. Yes, I like that start. So you've been on this job an entire four months, is that right? Ok. You've had a long successful career, Qualcomm Microsoft magically most recently at CEO, I want to talk about that, but maybe that's over drinks or something. Why agility right now as your next CEO role, you know, it's a great question right now. Humanoid robots are having a moment for sure. And I've always been fascinated with robotics. My whole career, my first boss had done his phd in robotics years ago and they're finally having this moment. And when I looked across the field of players agility to me, stood far and ahead of the others. It had a working autonomous robot that was getting ready to take actual work in factories. And since that point, we actually have done that. So I think we'll get into some of that. But did you have a treat for us? I do if you'd allow me, I'd love you to let me welcome digit to the stage digit is the name of our robot. So I have one obvious question at first actually two. Why, why legs at all? Because a lot of robots maybe roll and then why those legs? Ok. So they notice they're going the other way. So we have to go where humans go. That's what we were designed for the small spaces as oh digits waving hello to everyone. The small spaces that humans operate in. So humans, if you go into some of these big warehouses, humans can only reach so high. It had to reach that high and they can reach so low. It had to reach that low. It turns out knees get in the way of of picking up heavy things from the ground. So we put the legs going the other way they don't get in the way. Do you call those reverse knees or are they just some people call them bird legs? I just like to say they're digits legs and they're what works best in that situation. I think we need audience over there to wave. Hello as well. Yeah. Digit digit don't be shy the question. Ok. Yeah, so this was um oh yeah, now he's a ham. Now we can't get him off the stage. I'm waiting for him to take one of my tasks and um so I, you know, obviously this is a brief little fun demo, but digit is actually in workplaces right now. So as of a few weeks ago, digit is at GXO Logistics. They're a third party logistics. A big one outside of Atlanta digit is taking path online and doing them in versus humans doing some of these dull repetitive tasks. Actually, Mary Daly was talking about it. If we want to augment humans, allow them to be freed up to do other things. And it will take the very repetitive things that are part of the everyday job off of the humans plate so they could be more productive in other areas. Are we going to see? I think, I think maybe we have a clip, we can show, we have a clip, we can show where we're operating right now if we can run that video. So GX actually moves spans women's wear and you know, they have these huge automated warehouses and then there's still a human moving things from a conveyor belt to a cart or from a cart to a put wall and it's those points. This actually is in an Amazon facility, a real, a real Amazon real Amazon facility. And um so amidst these islands of automation, this is sometimes the Achilles Heel because uh there's, there needs to be a human in there and they're hard to find. There's about 1.1 million open jobs in the material moving space in the US today alone and they can't be filled. Nobody wants these jobs. They're doubling it doubled in the last five years because we all want next day delivery. And you know, if you want your spans the next day, you know, you want digit in there delivering them. So we have a lot to talk about, but I'm sure the audience will have a bunch of questions. So I'm hoping to get to a few of you. So start thinking about what, what you wanna know uh from Peggy or maybe from well, goodbye digit. But um maybe from digit uh as well. So a lot of questions, you, there's a lot of money going into the space right now. A lot of noise, like you said, you're actually, you're, you have a real live commercial relationship with G XO. You're in Spank's facility. You're also in an Amazon facility. I've covered Amazon a long time. Some of the automation reduces repetitive tasks, but they've also had situations where it then speeds up the work and there's some safety concerns as well. So I'm curious like when you're going into these facilities, what the goals are and how much you prioritize safety along the way. Safety, 100% 100%. This company was built on a safety foundation. So from the software to the hardware to how it moves and how it's programmed, you are operating in an environment with other people right now, we still operate inside of a work cell. OK? But we're headed towards that means no, no humans within our able to, right. And that's powered down. They're 140 pounds. There's a lot of torque. And so you have to be careful about that. However, we're on a path to what's called functional safety. So, in the next 18 months or so, we'll be able to incorporate all of the things that are needed in order to be able to interoperate near humans. Can you talk about sort of some of the stats about what the robot can do in terms of weight, that digit can uh lift battery cycle obviously like these, this is a, this is a cost issue, right? For a lot of these employers. And so I'm curious all the metrics that go into them, figuring out whether they can save money by using digit or many digits. Yes. And right now we're looking at under a two year ry versus a human at a fully loaded 30 dollars per hour. So that's the benchmark that we're focused at. You're right about, you know, power, you need to be operating, we operate for hours, but we, we recharge ourselves right now. We're at about a 2 to 1 ratio. So what does that mean? Exactly? So two hours or units of operating time versus one unit of charging? Ok. But moving to a 4 to 1 and then moving higher up in our next gen to 8 to 10 to 1. So that's the trajectory we're on there. We can lift, you know, right now, between our current gen and next gen, we're moving from about 30 pounds to about 50 pounds. But you have this OSHA limit already in place for humans. So that's the bar we have to meet there and we'll, which is, which is the 50 uh, 50 pounds. Yeah, but, you know, if you think about 50 pounds lifting something over and over and over again, that's the problem. That's where the injuries come in. That's where the quitting comes in. The turnover. You know, there's in these warehouses, turnover is super high. So, so, um I, I will call and if, if anyone has a question, please raise your hand and I'll get to you. Um, ok, we'll, we'll go to one now and then we'll come back. Uh Please just tell us your name. Yeah, you right. Oh, you need a mic, don't you? Uh coming up, coming up right behind you. Tell us who you are and what company you're with, please. Hi, Peggy. Hi, Ken Washington. I'm the CTO at Metronic. Um, and I've known your company for a long time, um, from my days at Ford Motor Company and also at Amazon. And in both of those examples of my past, the, the digit experience has changed a lot and, but what hasn't, what I haven't seen yet is, is a inter inter, is an integration of digit with other automation platforms. Is that something that you're thinking about how to create an API so that other parts of your automated ecosystem can communicate with digit and vice versa? So that they create a system and work together in a, in an optimized way to workflow. Absolutely. So we have developed a software platform called ARC. It has all the API S to plug into the warehouse management systems that are existing in facilities today. So we've integrated already with Manhattan and several others. So we can step into the existing workflow. We don't want to have to have the operator change, the infrastructure change, anything about the workflow. We just step right in, plug into their management or their warehouse management systems. And we've also integrated with quite a few other robots, whether they're autonomous mobile robot carts or put walls or conveyor belts. And so we've got it on both ends where that human goes, digit walks in and we're connected on either side. How, how, how far along are you in that, in that journey? Like how confident are you that you can walk into a new customers facility and whatever the automation is digit can currently work within that or is that a work in progress? Very confident. The good thing is we have a team of people who started and built robotics companies on my leadership team and they brought that sensibility, the safety, the regulatory, the compliance, the fact that you have to step into an existing workflow. All of that is beyond just getting the robot to walk right. You have to enter the corporate it infrastructure and make it work for them, you don't want to make them change things. So we have a good sense of that from the leadership team that uh that the folks before I arrived had, had built, let's talk about the technology a little bit and I'll get to another question if we, if we have right after this. Um How is digit doing what it just did on stage? And then how is it learning and, or deciding how to work inside these active facilities that it's in right now, right? So how it's doing? It is company is 10 years old. It came out of Oregon State University with the Robotics Institute there. We have still a big tech force there and also a factory nearby that we have built to take advantage of the location. Um But digit has been, you know, 10 years in the making. This is highly complex, a highly complex physics project. The dynamics of locomotion are terribly complex. The team solved that part of it. Now, when, when the world changed November 30th 2022 with Chat GPT, we can start to introduce that to help with the semantic intelligence. Now, we have been using reinforcement learning for several years on the locomotion to refine the locomotion so that digit can walk over uneasy places, it can go up and down stairs and, and, and that's what makes it very different from say, a wheeled robot, it can traverse those things. So that part's been great reinforcement learning helps that. But the semantic intelligence with chat G BT is, is just amazing. It's the embodiment of A I. What, what can, can you give the audience an example of, of how that might work? Yeah. So now we have the ability to direct digit. So the other day, we threw a bunch of trash on the floor, different kinds of trash and we put all the bins behind digits. So, you know, recycle landfill and we said just gave it one command digit, clean up this trash and digit scans the room picks up the paper, puts it in the recycle, uh picks up some cardboard, does the same thing goes and picks up some bubble wrap and puts it in the, in the trash and we all went, uh you know, mistake but it turns out bubble wrap is not recyclable. So digit with the power of chat GP T underneath was able to make that decision. So now we don't have to code all of that. We can just with the, with Chat GP and other LL MS, we have the ability to just give digit a direction. So digit can do one thing in the morning for a company, a different thing in the afternoon. Um Do we have any other audience questions? Otherwise I'll keep going because I love talking. Um All right, I, I'm gonna start actually sorry, we're gonna start there. II I faked you out. Um Yeah. Right. Right. There, please tell us who you are. Yes, Sterling Audie with uh with Barclays. So the example that you showed is a single unit in a single unit use case. But I guess we can all envision armies of these being throughout the warehouse. So have you already kind of developed the the management platform and ability to kind of have a, you know, a control plane across the larger number of units? That's exactly what ARC is. So what and what we're finding is the employees who used to do, maybe all of that physical work are becoming the managers of the robots. So they're along the way getting to be upskilled with the use of our ARC platform. They're the ones who are managing the fleet and it doesn't have to be just digits, right? We're connecting to AMS and other things so they can look at the fleet of automation and manage that from there. They have a digital AM just for folks. Oh, sorry, autonomous mobile robots. So they're the carts that you'll see going back and forth in the warehouse facilities. Got it. Yeah, that answer a question for you. Ok. I'll come to you right now. Yeah. No, you can, you can go ahead a Cody Cerny with insignia Peggy. Great to see you. Is there anything that's keeping you up at night or any worries you have about the development of these robots and implementation? Well, the biggest thing keeping me up at night right now is I just got off the phone with my commercial officer and we are just getting ready to produce our next gen in the fall. It, you know, it's already developed and we have this factory up and running. We've got a line up. Why don't you tell people, I, I missed that one. You, you have your own factory. We built a factory in, out, you know, outside of Oregon State and we have the ability to ramp up to 10,000 units a year because we, we saw that demand and we didn't want to miss it as it was coming in. But right now we have handfuls of robots and we have a lot of interest from automotive companies, retail grocers across the board, anybody who's running these kind of facilities. And, and anyway, we're struggling just to figure out where they go next until the fall and we'll be able to open it up because the fall is when you'll, you'll making our next gen next gen. Um How many do you think you can produce next year? Versus that 10,000 capacity next year? We're hundreds and the year after thousands. So that's sort of the ramp that we're looking at. The good thing is, is the factory is in the US, my engineers are nearby. I don't have to put them on planes anywhere and it is, you know, it, we're capable of ramping up. It's not, and it's not Capex. Heavy. It's largely assembly test, repair, that kind of thing. So we can ramp up pretty quickly. If I need a second one, I could, I could get one up and running fairly quickly. Um, funding wise, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. Um How about 180 million? Not too much about that. Ok, so sorry. Ok. Um, like how much is, is that a constraint on building out this vision that you see for many different types of workplaces? Yeah, so the next we are raising now we're in our series C right now and that will take us out the next couple of years until we hit that 10,000 unit. But the good thing is because we're deployed already. We are getting the very first robot as a service contract, multi year contract for humanoids. So we're getting a monthly revenue already on those units and every and units that we put on after that we'll have that, that incoming monthly revenue. Do you know what the discussion is that employers are that you're testing with or or putting these robots into their facilities, what they're having with their employees? Because I know what we've talked about taking tasks, not jobs, but Amazon for example, second biggest largest, second largest private sector employer in the US, 1.5 million jobs. I've talked to hundreds of these employees over the years. Some of them, a lot of them see robots and their concerns So what, what, like, what is the message there? That is believable. Well, that's believable. I think it's reality. There is 1.1 million unfilled jobs. They can't find people to do that. So, what does that do? It? Taxes the people who are there even more and they're ending up doing this repetitive work for longer parts of their day when maybe it used to be a two hour job. They're, you know, they're doing it for four or six hours. And if you see in the video, you know, it's literally moving a plastic bin from here to there, it's mind numbing. And so it's not that people are seeking those jobs. They, they just can't fill them, you know, and it's a retired workforce, it can't refill. So they have a real problem so far. Everything that we, all of our interactions have been very positive because it does give you the opportunity to upskill that worker and put them into a higher. We'll come back in five years and talk some more. I'm getting evil eye. We're out of time. Thank you so much, Peggy. Thank you. Thanks everybody.