Veteran tech exec Peggy Johnson named Agility Robotics CEO

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The humanoid race is continuing to heat up. Agility Robotics kicked off the week by naming Peggy Johnson its chief executive officer. Johnson is a veteran technology leader who most recently served as CEO of Magic Leap, which produces augmented reality headsets. She led the company’s shift from consumer to enterprise, recapitalized the company and more.

Agility Robotics co-founder Damion Shelton has served as CEO since the company’s founding in 2015. Shelton will now be the company’s president and part of Johnson’s leadership team. Johnson will guide Agility’s next phase of growth as it expands commercial deployments, broadens its product portfolio, and prepares to manufacture Digit at scale.

Before Magic Leap, Johnson spent six years as executive vice president of business development at Microsoft. She reported directly to CEO Satya Nadella and was responsible for driving strategic partnerships and transactions to accelerate growth for the company and its customers. Johnson launched M12, Microsoft’s first corporate venture fund that in three years had added more than 80 companies to its portfolio.

“Peggy Johnson’s long track record of engineering and business success at Qualcomm and Microsoft, and her recent achievements driving change as CEO of Magic Leap, make her the perfect leader to take Agility through the transition from cutting-edge technology startup to leading global robotics company. I couldn’t be more excited to have her join us,” said Shelton. “I also want to recognize the incredible work of our employees and our leadership team in driving Agility’s success to date. With Peggy at the helm, Agility can bring robotics to new heights.”

Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson

Prior to Microsoft, she spent 24 years at Qualcomm, where she served as a member of the company’s executive committee and held various leadership positions across engineering, sales, marketing, and business development. She was responsible for leading the Internet Services division, which launched a mobile app downloading platform, BREW, in 2001. BREW enabled the download of billions of apps to mobile phones, which enhanced Qualcomm’s chip sales and produced over $1 billion in revenue from app sales.

“I am thrilled to be joining the finest robotics team on the planet,” said Johnson. “In a field cluttered with ‘demo-ware’ and hype, Agility stands apart for having resolutely, steadily, and remarkably made a human-centric robot that actually works—and in demanding customer environments. Damion Shelton and his exceptional team have positioned the company for global scale and growth across industries. Together, we will make Agility the world’s most trusted maker of robots that are as helpful to workers as they are beneficial to bottom lines. This is Agility’s time.”

Digit is the world’s only bipedal robot currently delivering productive work for customers. It is also the only deployment-ready bipedal robot that is engineered to comply with OSHA’s stringent safety standards and demonstrated to run large AI models to adapt dynamically to new tasks.

This is another significant move for Agility Robotics as it gears up to manufacture its Digit humanoid at scale. In May 2023, the company named Melonee Wise CTO. Wise sold autonomous mobile robot maker (AMR) Fetch Robotics to Zebra Technologies in 2021 for $290 million.

Digit humanoid leads way

The Digit humanoid stands 5 ft. 9 in. (1.75 m) tall and can carry payloads up to 35 lb. (16 kg). Digit has been in development for several years now, but in late 2023 Amazon announced it is testing Digit in an R&D warehouse near Seattle. The initial task is to help with tote recycling.

GXO Logistics, the world’s largest pure-play contract logistics provider, is also testing Digit. It is also being tested for tote recycling at a Spanx facility in Flowery Branch, Ga. In this pilot, Digit is moving totes off of AMRs and onto a conveyor. The AMRs, which appear to be Chucks from 6 River Systems, bring the packed totes to a transfer station. Digit then uses its perception system to detect the AMR has arrived.

Later this year, Agility will open RoboFab, a 70,000-square-foot robot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon. Agility anticipates production capacity of hundreds of Digit robots in the first year, with the capability to scale to more than 10,000 robots per year at this location. Agility said Digit is engineered to meet the safety requirements for deployment in OSHA-regulated industries.

Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robot officer of Agility Robotics, will keynote the Robotics Summit & Expo, which runs May 1 and 2 in Boston and is produced by The Robot Report. The event expects more than 5,000 attendees and is designed to help robotics engineers overcome the technical challenges of building commercial robots.

Humanoid race heating up

Nearly a dozen companies worldwide introduced humanoid prototypes in 2023. That includes Figure AI, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that last week raised $675 million in Series B funding.

Ash Sharma, managing director at Interact Analysis, has said warehousing offers humanoids the perfect combination of repetitiveness and menial work, coupled with a lack of standardization and a lack of uniformity of things handled. For companies operating fulfillment centers with a wide product mix or fluctuating demand, the flexibility of humanoid robots could deliver a solution to the ongoing labor and skills crisis in the logistics industry.

He added that Interact Analysis’ research suggests the flexibility and scalability humanoid robots offer could be a possible answer to ongoing labor and skills shortages. However, it does not come without complications, and it is yet to be seen whether these will be easily overcome to see their rapid deployment in warehouses.

The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) included humanoids as one of its top robotics trends for 2024. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also recently shared five robotics startups that he’s excited about. Three of those are focused on humanoids, including Agility, Apptronik, and RoMeLa from UCLA.

And although it hasn’t announced any plans to commercialize its humanoid, Boston Dynamics recently released a video showing Atlas picking and placing automotive struts. The significance of the demo is that Atlas performs all of the object recognition using the robot’s onboard sensors. Atlas acquires the automotive struts, using its grippers from a vertical storage unit, and places them horizontally onto a flow cart.