In Episode 156 of The Robot Report Podcast, editors Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss the news of the week.

In this episode, we get into the details behind Jacobi Robotics’ new industrial robotics robot control architecture with co-founder and CEO Max Cao.

Also on this episode, we feature a conversation between Jake Hall, the “Manufacturing Millennial,” and Jan Hennecke, product manager at igus.

Show timeline

• 7:55 – News
• 29:03 – Interview with Max Cao, co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics
• 1:07:04 – Interview by Jake Hall, the “Manufacturing Millennial,” and Jan Hennecke, product manager at igus

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In the news this week

• Here’s what it could cost to hire a Digit humanoid
  • Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson gave us a quick peek behind the curtain for Digit while speaking at a tech conference this week.  The application is a “small fleet” of humanoids currently deployed at a Spanx facility in Flowery Branch, Ga. Digit picks up totes from mobile robots and places the totes onto conveyors. The robot can then pick up empty or totes, as well as pick up totes from either the bottom or top shelf of a mobile robot.
  • She said Agility Robotics is currently charging a “fully loaded $30 per hour” for its humanoid. She said the return on investment (ROI) for customers is under two years. It’s unlikely Digit is working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But if it was, that would cost $262,800 per robot per year. For a 40-hour work week, it would cost about $62,400 to run Digit for a year.
  • Digit is the 2024 RBR50 Robot of the Year.
• Skild AI grabs $300M to build a foundation model for robotics
  • Skild AI emerged from stealth mode and announced that it has closed a $300 million Series A round. The company is developing the Skild Brain, a robotics foundation model, as well as a mobile manipulation platform and a quadruped platform for security and inspection. It joins companies such as OpenAI, Covariant, and NVIDIA that are attempting to build a foundation model that can be applied to multiple applications, irrespective of the mechanical design of the mechanism. As opposed to vertically designed robots that are built for specific applications, Skild’s AI model would serve as a shared, general-purpose brain for a diverse embodiment of robots, scenarios, and tasks, including manipulation, locomotion, and navigation.
• Helm.ai launches VidGen-1 generative video model for autonomous vehicles and robots
  • The company recently launched VidGen-1, a generative AI model that it said produces realistic video sequences of driving scenes. Helm.ai previously announced GenSim-1 for AI-generated and labeled images of vehicles, pedestrians, and road environments for both predictive tasks and simulation. Stated Vladislav Voroninski, co-founder and CEO of Helm.ai: “Generating realistic video sequences of a driving scene represents the most advanced form of prediction for autonomous driving, as it entails accurately modeling the appearance of the real world and includes both intent prediction and path planning as implicit sub-tasks at the highest level of the stack.”

Links from the show

Startups, sign up for the Pitchfire competition at RoboBusiness 2024 in Santa Clara, Calif. The deadline is Aug. 9.