AgiBot, a humanoid robotics company based in Shanghai, has engineered a way for two-armed robots to learn manufacturing tasks through human training and real-world practice on a factory production line.
The company says its system, which combines teleoperation and reinforcement learning, is being tested on a production line belonging to Longcheer Technology, a Chinese company that manufactures smartphones, VR headsets, and other electronic gadgets.
AgiBot’s project shows how more advanced AI is starting to change the abilities of industrial machines—an innovation that may creep into new areas of manufacturing in China and elsewhere. The trend may increase manufacturing productivity and could allow products to be made with fewer low-wage human workers. This might lead to some jobs disappearing, but new ones being created.
Robots are widely used in factories for chores like lifting boxes and moving bins. But the work involved in assembling, say, an iPhone requires dexterity, deft sensing, and adaptation—things that robots generally lack. While AI is increasingly used to help robots do things like spot items moving along conveyor belts and decide how to grasp them, it is not yet a reliable tool for training them to do complex manipulation.
AgiBot G2 in action. Courtesy of AgiBot
AgiBot representative Yuheng Feng says the robot deployed at the Longcheer plant takes components from a machine that performs testing, then places them onto a production line—the kind of task robots can handle because it does not involve fine manipulation or working with bendable or fragile parts.