One of the newest roles emerging in the fast-growing robotics sector isn’t in engineering or software: it’s babysitting.
New reporting by the Wall Street Journal documented the deployment of Digit, a humanoid robot, to a factory assembly line in South Carolina. For eight hours each day, the bipedal bot toils at the Schaeffler plant in Cheraw, SC, where — under the watchful eyes of a human “Agility contractor” — it operates a stamping press.
For now, the robot operates from within a plexiglass enclosure, a cage in which it’s observed by its fleshbag supervisor. Digit, the WSJ explains, can’t detect human beings in its environment just yet, requiring it to be penned off due to machine-guarding regulations. That’s expected to change by the end of the year, meaning factory workers could soon be toe-to-toe with humanoid robots on the assembly line.
“We’ve identified a whole host of use cases that we would like humanoid robots to do,” Courtney Baines, an advanced production technology engineer at Schaeffler told the WSJ.
What any of that means for human workers remains to be seen. Agility, the company behind Digit, told the paper that the robots currently pan out to between $10 to $25 an hour, depending on how the factory decides to deploy them. Going forward, Agility’s co-founder, Damion Shelton, said the goal is to hit around $2 to $3 an hour.
Entry-level jobs at the Cheraw plant begin at $20 an hour — and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out which production solution a for-profit entity would choose if humanoid robots ever become cheap enough to compete.
“Efficiency is the name of the game and it’s relentless,” Doug Thompson, a 14-year manufacturing worker at the Schaeffler plant told the WSJ. “It’s not going to stop.”
That news comes on the wings of a handful of successful manufacturing trials featuring humanoid robots. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Chinese company Xiami had successfully deployed two humanoid robots at its electric vehicle plant in Beijing. Like Digit, those bots were contained in a plexiglass enclosure — but given the speed at which the robotics industry is moving, don’t be shocked if that wall comes down sooner rather than later.
More on robots: This Video of a Humanoid Robot Playing Perfect Tennis Is Extremely Impressive
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