The global industrial robot market continues to grow, mainly due to the shortage of labor since the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Statista (2023), the industrial robot market will be worth 10.41 billion US dollars in the next five years.
In the first issue of 2025, MEGA Tech presented the trends and advancements of industrial robots that will play a key role in the manufacturing sector in the future: humanoid robots powered by AI.
New AI-Powered Humanoid Robots
AI, or artificial intelligence, has revolutionized industrial robots, enabling robots to perform tasks that previously relied on humans. AI enables industrial robots to automate difficult tasks such as welding, assembly, and inspection, enabling the manufacturing to increase accuracy and reduce human errors.
AI can also help with predictive maintenance to reduce downtime. It’s capable of adapting to changing tasks in flexible manufacturing environments, improving supply chain management efficiency by analyzing real-time data.
Famous industrial robots include Delta robots, which are used for fast pick-and-place operations in the food, pharmaceutical, and electronics industries, Articulated robots which are the most common industrial robots in manufacturing, logistics, foods, and agriculture, and Humanoid robots are designed to replace human workers in environments such as factories and logistics.
An interesting success in implementing AI in industrial robots is KUKA, which offers solutions for various industries such as automotive and aerospace manufacturing, by integrating the AI ChatGPT into robot programming.
“Programming robots is still a task reserved for experts,” says Roland Ritter, Program Manager of the KUKA Simulation Platform. “That’s why we are developing an AI Chatbot that translates human voice commands into programming language or code. The AI model then generates the code that allows the robot to perform the desired actions, such as picking up a part one by one and placing it in a U shape on a table”. The AI model is then trained by all available robot programs. In the next step, KUKA is now delivering the AI chatbot to their customers, so they can use their voice to command the robots instead of programming them.
Previously, engineers had to write programs to tell the robot to perform each step of the desired tasks. But at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google in London, says that they no longer need to write commands or programs. These humanoid robots learn soccer skills by themselves. From the beginning, they just run after the ball like a six-year-old boys playing soccer for the first time. They eventually learn how to dribble the ball past opponents to score goals. The human command to these robots is simply a single sentence: “Score as many goals as possible.”
Humanoid robots, New Coworkers
Finding people to fill in manufacturing and logistics jobs is a big challenge. “There are millions of open jobs in the United States that are not filled,” says Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. That’s where Agility’s humanoid robot “Digit” comes in. It’s been trained by AI to do the job, and Digit is currently working at a number of logistics companies, including Amazon. “Agility is the first company to put a humanoid robots to work and they actually get paid for it,” Johnson says. The company estimates that each robot could return its investment in less than two years. While Digit currently works in fence-protected area for human safety, she hopes to have them working shoulder-to-shoulder with humans by the end of 2025.
Digit is a robot has two arms and moves on two legs like a human. It features 16 degrees of freedom (DOF) (legs: 5 DoF x 2, arms: 3 DoF x 2), making it able stand up from the ground, lift boxes of up to 16 kg (30 lb). It is powered by a Lidar sensor, four Intel RealSense depth-sensing cameras, an absolute encoder, and dual multithreaded Intel i7 CPUs. It’s powered with a custom-designed 1.2 kWh lithium polymer battery. The main structure are made of aluminum, thermoformed polycarbonate, and carbon fiber composite.
Digit was launched in 2019. Agility’s Oregon manufacturing facility will be producing at a pace of 10,000 units per year to meet the urgent demand for industrial robots in the United States.
Amid concerns that robots will take away jobs from human. Johnson explains that “robots won’t take over jobs, they’ll take over the workload.” This means that human workers will be doing less of the physical work but more of the brain and managerial work. Back to a few years ago, you can imagin a line of workers sitting beside conveyor belt to manually assemble parts, and there is a supervisor to supervise these workers. Down the road, these workers will be replaced by robots, and the human workers will be responsible for supervising the robot fleets instead.
Article by: Asst. Prof. Suwan Juntiwasarakij, Ph.D., Senior Editor & MEGA Tech