There’s a robot at the door!

Human-like robots helping move packages in warehouses and even deliver the last 50-feet from delivery van to your front door is an ever-nearing possibility. With online retailing continuing to grow, such robots would help retailers’ warehousing be more efficient and delivery more affordable for customers.

Digit, a robot from Agility Robotics with arms and legs designed to work alongside humans, has now joined us to research this possibility. In fact, the first two Digit robots off the line are now our employees.

Digit has been designed to walk upright without wasting energy, so it has no issue traversing the same types of environments most people do every day. It can tightly fold itself up for easy storage in the back of a vehicle before being deployed to grab a package from the vehicle and bring it to your door.

If it encounters an unexpected obstacle, it can send an image back to the vehicle to leverage additional computing power. The vehicle could even send that information into the cloud and request help from other systems to enable Digit to navigate.

Ken Washington, vice president, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer.

“As online retailing continues growing, we believe robots will help our commercial customers build stronger businesses by making deliveries more efficient and affordable for all of us. We learned a lot this year working with Agility, now we can accelerate our exploratory work with commercial Digit robots.”

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