Digit is already on Amazon’s warehouse floor, but Agility Robotics, Digit’s creator, now says it has “down-to-earth” ambitions. It plans to build 10,000 robots a year for warehouses and storerooms globally, participating in an investment boom that has drawn in $1.6 billion in venture capital in the last five years.
Amazon said last week that its Innovation Fund is ramping up its investment in robotics.
Technological advances, including those in AI, are resulting in robots with greater human interaction. Recently, Figure AI raised $675 million to develop AI-powered humanoid robots, backed by investors like Jeff Bezos’ Explore Investments, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, OpenAI and Intel.
AI enables robots to understand their environments, especially detecting objects and people. It also allows for language generation and response to human speech. It also paves the way for greater and faster task learning and performance.
