Agility Robotics’ Post

Transcript

7 News is giving you a unique look at robots, including ones designed to work at Amazon. Our Lindsey Mastis was on Capitol Hill recently where the robots were on display. Hey Lindsey, Hey OK, these are really neat. Taller than me. Taller than me, OK, There is a big debate though about whether robots and artificial intelligence will be taking our jobs, but a lot of these companies behind the technology say that they are designing them to try to help keep humans safe. Digit is a humanoid robot designed to handle the hard stuff. It's already moving heavy boxes at Amazon and Spanx warehouses. I got to meet Digit and it's human colleague on Capitol Hill. Because of the crowded space, it stayed stationary, but I did get to lift its arm. I'm noticing that the arm is a little warm. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Yeah, because there's a motor controllers and drivers in there. And if you feel this part of the arm, it's not as warm. And yeah, there there's air. Is that we're actively cooling different parts of the robots, Melanie Wise says Their facility in Oregon is capable of producing up to 10,000 of these robots a year. That's a lot of digits. People are worried robots like this could take their jobs. But Wise points to a labor shortage and the physical safety of humans. When you look at robots, they're really designed to help people and take care of like really repetitive, dangerous, kind of straining tasks and make it easier for the worker. Even though Digit is designed to operate like a human, there are some stark differences. Look at its knees. They bend backwards instead of forwards because it helps them get closer to heavy objects. They also won't talk, and we did that on purpose, she says. Talking robots can undermine the confidence of their human colleagues because so many of us assume the robot is smarter. Why says it's not, and that it's humans that need to tell the robot what to do? You are the robots boss. Yes, everyone who works with the robot is the robots boss. A Digit weighs about 160 lbs and there was a video recently that showed it falling down after working for like 3 days straight. Well, why says that there are extra precautions when it comes to robots because they don't want it to fall on a human. But also it is better to have a robot fall than a human. A robot can be repaired or even replaced. And of course you can learn more about Digit and more of the robots on Capitol Hill. You can see all of my exclusive reports on wjla.com.