203: Humanoid Robots: Industrial Applications, Safety, and Going Beyond the Hype to Solve Real Problems Featuring Agility Robotics' Melonee Wise

Is the industry ready for humanoids? And perhaps more importantly, does the industry really need them? It’s a debate that’s been going on for some time, and back in episode 200, we even had an audience member call humanoids out as a gimmick! But are there real benefits to using humanoids?

We welcomed back Melonee Wise, the Chief Product Officer at Agility Robotics, the pros at manufacturing mobile manipulation robots and automation solutions. Melonee explains that there are definitely practical uses for humanoids and explains some ways they may outperform regular robotics in certain scenarios, such as containerized movement.

We hear a little backstory about Melonee’s career and why she founded Fetch Robotics, sold it, and took her current role at Agility Robotics. While running her company, she learned a lot about finding product-market fit and ensuring that the designs of robots are viable, in demand, and safe. Safety is a key theme in this episode, and Melonee reveals some of the specific scenarios we need to prepare for if we ever hope to get a robot from the design stage to implementation.

In this episode, find out:

• Are humanoids overhyped or is there a real use for them?
• The practical applications for humanoids in manufacturing and supply chain management
• The realities of managing robots on a production line and why instructions need to be programmed clearly
• Weighing up the speed of human workers vs. automated vehicles and robots, plus the other factors affecting human workers
• How AI plays into robotics development and why robotics would be advanced enough to progress without AI
• How we could manage data from robots to optimize supply chain management
• Why safety is always the biggest challenge with robotics and machinery and the different scenarios we need to account for before deploying a new piece of robotics
• The dangers of not thinking proactively about safety – both to the industry as a whole and to robotics developments
• What led Melonee to launch Fetch Robotics and how she found product-market fit with a new solution to a common problem
• Why Melonee stepped away from entrepreneurship to take a role at Agility Robotics

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Tweetable Quotes:

• “Humanoids would be having their moment right now, whether or not AI was also having its moment. I think that the technology is sufficiently advanced enough that we can do the work without leveraging AI if we needed to. Now, will AI help? Yes."
• “There are two factors that make containerized movement great for humanoids. One, it's very standard work and robotics always loves standard processes. And two, it's highly scalable. So it's worth the investment of the development.”
• “Humanoids are becoming the new best friends of AMRs. So that's where we're seeing a lot of success, especially because they’re highly repeatable and there are a lot of use cases for them.”

Links & mentions:

• Agility Robotics, the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile manipulation robots and automation solutions, working with the humanoid robot, Digit
• Fetch Robotics (now Zebra), Melonee’s original company, acquired by Zebra, is a robotics automation products manufacturer that helps robots work alongside humans

Make sure to visit http://manufacturinghappyhour.com for detailed show notes and a full list of resources mentioned in this episode. Stay Innovative, Stay Thirsty.