Agility Robotics recently published a video showcasing a team of Digit robots lifting and moving heavy weights inside a warehouse.

Unlike Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robots that are trained to parkour, Agility Robotics has created the Digit robots to perform mundane tasks that are tedious for the humans inside a warehouse. It is self-training these robots to do critical activities and improve the workforce efficiency and flexibility.

First revealed in 2020, these bipedal robots got their most high-profile time in the spotlight after Agility announced a collaboration with automaker Ford at CES. The auto giant presently owns two of these robots and intends to use them for door-to-door delivery.

The Digit robot is a direct successor of the “world record” Cassie Robot, which is Agility Robotics’ first bipedal robot that ran a 5K on a single charge and taught itself to run, walk and climb challenging terrains. At the same time, Digit has more advanced capabilities than Cassie, as the former has sensors and the torso and pair of arms.

Being the most recent innovation of Agility Robotics, Digit solves the mobility restrictions of traditional robots, allowing machines to work in human-designed spaces. It has intense walking and running movements, vision for stair climbing, and autonomous navigation in unstructured surroundings.

Interestingly, Digit also uses the chopstick model to handle heavy weights better than suction, like the Dextrous Robots.

Features of Agility Robotics’ Digit

  • Digit mainly possesses anatomical building blocks that manipulate to perform tasks with the help of its fully functioning legs, arms, and a slim torso.
  • Like humans, Digit also possesses the capacity to adjust its posture and the center of gravity when carrying objects and weights of different sizes and weights.
  • It can adjust itself to the demand of the surroundings; that is, the robot adjusts its position and movement while reaching high, low, or far for picking, carrying, and placing boxes and containers.
  • Digit is outfitted with Lidar, four Intel RealSense depth cameras, and MEMS IMU to encode absolute and incremental for proprioception. These sensors continuously read its surroundings, surface planes and also perceive the ground. Such advanced perception and early intelligence technology help Digit decide the most efficient way of doing and completing tasks, and it also allows it to respond to obstacles immediately.
  • Last but not least, Agility Robotics’ Digit can carry the weight of boxes and containers about 18 kgs.

With the tagline ‘Made for work,’ Digit is specifically designed to help the growing demand for robots that can perform complex tasks in an overall efficient way. While most robotic warehouse solutions build the warehouse from scratch, Digit is simply a plug-and-play solution that requires to fed with a location map.

Agility Robotics is planning to bring in more efficient and powerful bipedal robots that can be employed in various sectors like logistics, workplaces, research, telepresence, and automated inspection.

Agility Robotics