Mercedes starts operating humanoid robots made by Apptronik.
In the field of humanoid robotics, pilot season has officially started.Amazon tested Agility’s Digit robots in a few distribution centers last year.And Figure announced a partnership with BMW in January. Apptronik is now participating in the market thanks to a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz.
Austin-based Robotics
“As part of the agreement, Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz will collaborate on identifying applications for highly advanced robotics in Mercedes-Benz Manufacturing,” states the Austin-based robotics firm.Moreover, specific financial information has not been released, as is typical with these kinds of transactions.Additionally, a pilot program includes a relatively small number of systems, which makes sense considering how new the technology is.
Utilizing Apptronik
Nevertheless, both sides are thought to benefit equally from these agreements. While Mercedes communicates to investors and customers that it is looking to the future, Apptronik can show that a major car brand is clearly interested in working with them.What matters most is what happens next. If the pilot is successful and leads to the automaker placing a major order, it would be a huge plus for Apptronik and the industry as a whole.
Recent investor interest in humanoids has been enormous, as demonstrated by Figure’s astounding $675 million funding round. The ensuing years will be crucial to these companies’ ongoing performance as they strive to demonstrate a significant return on investment.
CEO and co-founder Jeff Cardenas
“Mercedes plans to use robotics and Apollo for automating some low skill, physically challenging, manual labor — a model use case which we’ll see other organizations replicate in the months and years to come,”. Co-founder and CEO Jeff Cardenas says in a release regarding what the robots will actually do on the manufacturing floor.
Experts refer to the degree of labor that these devices will replace as ‘low skill.’. My assumption is that it entails a lot of physically demanding repetitive tote moving from point A to point B. Which is both necessary and (relatively) simple to automate. The other significant component of “low skill” is probably an attempt to head off arguments that human workers should be replaced. It will take some time before humanoids can accomplish this in a significant way.