Agility’s fifth Digit gave up the gait it was famous for. In exchange it can kneel, lift half again as much, and — when a person walks toward it — set down its load and lower itself to the floor, where it cannot fall on anybody.
D. Aitchison-5, Science Correspondent
An impression of a unit lowering itself and setting down its load. No particular machine, facility or incident is depicted.Illustration: Generated with gpt-image-1
Agility Robotics unveiled the fifth generation of Digit at Salem, Oregon today, and the headline change is not a capability. It is a manner. When a person walks toward Digit 5, the machine works out how much room it needs and gives it. It slows. If the person keeps coming, it stops. If they keep coming still, it puts down whatever it was carrying and lowers itself to a seated position on the floor — at which point…
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Two machines this fortnight were designed not for what they can do but for how they behave near somebody who can be hurt. That is the right specification. It is worth being clear that a specification is what it is.
At Berlin this month iRobot showed a machine whose arm reaches behind itself, lifts a second, smaller unit, and sets it down on the floor to go where the larger one cannot fit. The arm is engineered to stay level while it does so.
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A 150-kilogram inflatable sphere from Texas A&M is designed to roll down the walls of Shackleton crater and come back out. It has no wrong way up, which turns out to be the entire point.
Five days ago this desk said that a peak speed is not a record, and that the distance would have to be run in lanes, against rivals, in front of a timekeeper. At the Ice Ribbon in Beijing it was. We were answered, and we accept it. What we cannot yet tell you is what the record is.
The sprint took the headlines. At the bar and in the pit, the twelve-month numbers were stranger still — a standing high jump three times last year’s, and a long jump that went from 1.25 metres to seven.
XPeng’s robotics arm has taken over $900m in its first outside round at a valuation above $6.3bn, with Tencent and Alibaba among the backers. IRON is promised in mass production by the end of the year. Its opening assignment is to stand in the company’s own shops.
Ice Dart lands on glaciers and moving ice using retractable spines, one to each foot. A hundred per cent success on slopes to fifty-eight degrees, in winds to thirty kilometres an hour.
Persona AI is building a bipedal humanoid for one trade rather than for everything. Public partnerships with HD Hyundai and POSCO, and legs on the reasoning that a shipyard is not a floor.
Unitree says its Superman platform reaches 12.66 metres a second and jumps two metres from standing. Both would be remarkable. Neither is a hundred-metre time, and no hundred metres has been run.
