A close-up look at the present—and future—of humanoid robots

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. How could humanoid robots reshape the workplace? Joanna Stern, senior personal-technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, talked about that future with Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Agility Robotics, at the recent WSJ Tech Live conference. They were joined onstage by one of the company’s Digit robots, a humanoid that demonstrated its potential to learn to perform tasks.

Here are edited excerpts of the conversation. WSJ: What does Digit do? PEGGY JOHNSON: It can go into places that are built for humans and take tasks off the human workers’ hands—in particular right now, things that are repetitive and dirty and sometimes backbreaking. Those are the sorts of tasks that we’re focused on.

It’s built to be a multipurpose robot. But the tasks right now are really focused on material handling and moving things, largely in logistics, facilities, warehouses, things like that. WSJ: And does Digit have a job right now? JOHNSON: Digit gets paid to work right now at a company called GXO.

They are a logistics provider. And we’re actually moving Spanx. Digit, all day long, just moves product off these small tugs—autonomous mobile robots—and turns around and puts them on a conveyor belt, over and over and over again.

So you can understand how nobody really wants these jobs. These are the areas that Digit can step in and take these kinds of tasks that most people don’t want to do. WSJ: How many Digits are actually out working? JOHNSON: We have several of our alpha units out there, but we’re right now building our commercial units in our factory in Salem, Ore.