Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (TMMC) Thursday confirmed plans to deploy Agility Robotics’ humanoids at an assembly plant in Woodstock, Ontario – roughly 80 miles southwest of Toronto. This second phase follows a year a year-long pilot in which three systems were put to work on-site in the province.
The new deployment remains small scale, at seven robots. Agility remains well ahead of other western humanoid firms in terms of putting robots to work in real-world settings, but much work remains in terms of scaling up these efforts. TMMC, which is currently leasing the systems as part of a robots as a service (RaaS) deal, has agreed to pick up additional systems, should things go well this time out.
“Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has long been a leader in automotive manufacturing innovation,” TMMC President Tim Hollander says in a statement tied to this morning’s news. “After evaluating a number of robots, we are excited to deploy Digit to improve the team member experience and further increase operational efficiency in our manufacturing facilities.”
This septet of Digits will be put to work loading and unloading totes from autonomous forklifts. Like other humanoid firms, Agility has focused on mastering one job at a time, in a bid to achieve generalization in an industrial setting. Tote moving has been a key application for its other partner deployments, including logistics giant Amazon, motion control firm Schaeffler, and retail giant Amazon.
“In addition to the work Digit is doing today, Agility and TMMC will continue to assess further use cases where robots and AI could help augment automotive production,” Agility writes. “The companies will explore how automating some extremely repetitive and physically taxing tasks commonly found on automotive manufacturing production lines could reduce strain and increase safety for employees, freeing them to do more value-added work in the production facility.”
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