{"id":591130,"date":"2026-07-17T22:13:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/591130\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T22:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T22:13:10","slug":"agility-robotics-plants-its-flag-in-teslas-backyard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/591130\/","title":{"rendered":"Agility Robotics plants its flag in Tesla’s backyard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year.<\/p>\n

Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be \u201cthe biggest product ever\u201d once it\u2019s \u201cuseful outside of Tesla sometime next year.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Agility doesn\u2019t have Tesla\u2019s capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada<\/a>. The company says it has secured $300 million in contract orders for its robots.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone, and it\u2019s good to have others in the humanoid space,\u201d CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. \u201cWe have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agility hasn\u2019t disclosed how many Digits that it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company has said, for example, that Digits have moved 100,000<\/a> totes at a GXO logistics facility.<\/p>\n

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse-merger<\/a> that is expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to safely walk on two legs, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI-inspired robotic startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics.<\/p>\n

While the arrival of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advancements in robotic behavior, Agility is taking a practical approach to autonomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don\u2019t want the anti-lock brake controller under AI control,\u201d Agility co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton told TechCrunch. \u201cThe analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that\u2019s not generative AI, right? You don\u2019t want to get creative with your safety stack.\u201d<\/p>\n

What AI does do, however, is deliver on the promise of scale. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility\u2019s board] asked us how we were going to go about coding applications for the robot, we didn\u2019t really have a good answer,\u201d Shelton said. \u201cThe number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far larger than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI answers that question definitively.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new facility is designed to accelerate the company\u2019s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in talks with the company about deploying Digit, and the new facility will be where the six-foot-tall robot learns new skills in environments similar to those it will experience in the field.<\/p>\n

Unlike many of the newer entrants to the humanoid space, Agility isn\u2019t planning to offer in-home humanoid robots anytime soon. It\u2019s a view that jibes with that of most independent robotics experts, who believe today\u2019s most powerful robots aren\u2019t safe enough for consumer use. Digit operates in a human-free space right now, but the version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will have the ability to sense humans and won\u2019t need to be kept in a robot-only zone.<\/p>\n

Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst said there is plenty of work to keep Agility busy in manufacturing and logistics alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s start with the bins and the totes, and then let\u2019s do the picking and the kitting,\u201d Hurst told TechCrunch. \u201cAnd then let\u2019s like start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Okay, now we\u2019re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[134879,291,289,290,18,19,17,57831,82,1298],"class_list":["post-591130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agility-robotics","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-optimus","tag-technology","tag-tesla"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}