The robot can balance on one foot, navigate obstacles and fold itself to fit into the back of a car. One other thing Digit can also use its arms to carry and deliver packages straight to your door, and even ask for help if a problem occurs along the way.
No wonder that a big company like automaker Ford has purchased two of the robots to explore how the technology, developed by Agility Robotics and presented at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, might be used in a warehouse setting and for delivering goods.
Indeed, an increasingly sophisticated generation of robots is proving capable of doing a wide range of jobs, from bringing you toilet paper to flipping burgers and performing surgery.
Food for thought
The food industry is also ripe for automation because its tasks are mostly physical and repetitive. “They are not very sophisticated and you can design the environment so that the work can be repetitively performed. Those types of things are subject to being automated,” Khargoneker said.
At Cafe X shops in San Francisco and San Jose, California, for example, robot baristas make and serve coffee. And California restaurant chain Caliburger is testing an aptly named robot, “Flippy,” which costs up to $100,000 and which can flip 2,000 burgers a day, at one location.
