Hardware Podcasts

203: Humanoid Robots: Industrial Applications, Safety, and Going Beyond the Hype to Solve Real Problems Featuring Agility Robotics' Melonee Wise

Manufacturing Happy Hour · 17 Sept 2024 · 57m

AI in practice: 2 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Melonee Wise, Chief Product Officer at Agility Robotics and founder of the acquired Fetch Robotics, discusses the practical industrial applications of humanoid robots, specifically focusing on containerized movement and safety challenges. She explains how Agility's Digit robot complements Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) by handling tasks like nesting and palletizing, and argues that while AI aids development, the core technology is already viable for scalable deployment. Wise also reflects on her past experience building Fetch Robotics, emphasizing the importance of product-market fit, labor availability, and navigating the hype cycle to build a sustainable business.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Engineering & simulationChatGPT

The AI interprets plain English descriptions of work processes to generate visual programming code that can be run on the robot, allowing users to program tasks via chat interface.

“one of the 1st cases that we've considered for, uh, helping people, Um, program the robots is by having them type in the chat GPT, something like, I need you to do this work plot process and this, and describe it in plain English language and then use that to interpret it to build, uh, visual programming language that can then be run on the robot.”

Speaker 1 · Hear it at 23:22

Engineering & simulation

AI is used to build multimodal models from large masses of data to train the robot, the fleet, and the overall system.

“you have large masses of data that you build multimodel, multimodel models with that are then used to train the robot, the fleet, and then the overall system.”

Speaker 1 · Hear it at 27:06

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Agility Robotics, Fetch Robotics, Zebra, Willow Garage, Boston Dynamics, GXO, Amazon, Locust, 6 River, Automotors, Fortinet
Products
Digit, Kiva

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