27 Oct 2024, 03:30 PM IST The limitations of a robot come from its components: cameras, the lidar and radar, the motors and actuators, the power pack and the computer. Summary While technology has facilitated improved dexterity in robots like Tesla’s Optimus, making it a marketable household product remains a challenge. These machines would be great productivity boosters for factories and retailers, though. Gift this article Also read: Elon Musk’s humanoid robot can do squats and boil eggs. All you need to know about Optimus Gen-2 Instead of household chores, Digit, built by Agility Robotics, loads containers filled with Spanx shapewear products on a conveyor belt at an e-com warehouse in the Atlanta suburbs. The robot is improving its output and is getting closer to the 20 seconds it takes a human to do the job. Digit was last clocked at a pace of about 30 seconds, according to Wise. “We’re about to go through another major optimization, which should bring that down quite a bit," she said. Even simple tasks take a lot of programing, testing, trial and error. Her team undertook a project to make Digit mimic how workers react when orders flood in and the conveyor belt has no open space for a container. The workers stack the boxes at the side of the belt. When the flood subsides and there is space, they place containers on the conveyor. This is complicated stuff for a robot to tackle. But once the robot does a task successfully, all robots can copy it. The limitations of a robot come from its components: cameras, the lidar and radar that create vision, the motors and actuators that enable movement, the power pack that gives it energy and the computer that acts as a brain. Digit’s battery lasts four hours (two with strenuous work) and takes an hour to charge up. Dexterity is improving rapidly. The advances that let robots balance on two feet have been astounding. Although our hands will likely never be matched by a machine, robots have the advantage of being able to swap out end-of-arm tools such as drills, pinchers, brushes and other so-called end-effectors that serve as robot hands. For now, Agility’s robot is kept away from people. In a couple of years, Wise said, the company expects to have a version that will be safe to work among and interact with humans.