Humanoid
Jabil Inc., a design, supply chain, and manufacturing services provider based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has offered its perspective on how humanoid robots are progressing from prototypes to mass production. The company has worked with Apptronik on bringing its Apollo humanoid into active manufacturing environments, positioning itself as a partner for robotics developers scaling toward volume production.
While much of the sector’s attention has focused on demonstration videos and large funding rounds, Jabil’s Thomas Brown, senior director for engineering and technology including digital commerce and robotics, described a quieter phase of development and value-proposition work. Companies preparing to ramp up humanoid production include Tesla, 1X Technologies, XPeng, and UBTECH, according to the source.
In terms of managing expectations, a lot of customers have gotten humanoids out in low volumes, but we are entering a phase of tens of thousands, where it’s no longer something that’s assembled by hand on site.
Brown said the industry is moving into a phase of tens of thousands of units, where hand assembly on site is no longer viable and where cost structure, manufacturability, and quality improvement become critical. He noted that Jabil can help developers cost down their designs to reach those scales, and that when robots remain expensive, only limited numbers can be produced for gathering AI training data, requiring more customer use-case validation.
On the compute side, Brown said current compute is sufficient for many experiences shown in demonstration reels, but that more computing capacity is needed at the edge. He identified the NVIDIA Jetson series as a popular lineup among Jabil’s customers.
Source: The Robot Report