By the end of the year, a new humanoid robotics factory in southeast Salem will begin producing its newest machines that are capable of performing repetitive tasks in warehouses.
Agility Robotics’ RoboFab 70,000 square foot facility at 4698 Truax Dr. S.E. opened in late 2023 and will serve as the manufacturing hub for the growing company, which eventually plans to mass produce the robots.
Amazon is already testing the humanoid robots, which are called Digit and sold in fleets controlled by cloud-based software, at a facility near Seattle. Agility hopes the robots will help augment the human workforce, help companies deal with labor shortages, and improve the quality of life for human workers.
The Corvallis-based company was co-founded by Jonathan Hurst, a professor of mechanical, industrial, and manufacturing engineering at the Oregon State University College of Engineering.
Hurst said he arrived at OSU in 2008, and planted the seed for the university’s now-robust robotics program.
In 2015, Hurst co-founded Agility Robotics to help maximize human potential in the workplace. The company produced its first commercial bipedal robot, Cassie, which Hurst said was sold to universities as a research product.
Hurst said while humanity is a long way off from a world where robots are part of everyday life, technology is moving in that direction.
“We are at this amazing inflection point in history, where before this, things were one way, and after this, things are a different way,” Hurst said. “Our vision for Agility Robotics is to enable humans to be more human. Humans should be having the creativity, the variety, and the social interaction. Robots should be doing the dull, dirty, dangerous, repetitive tasks.”
The company began producing Digit in a 16,000 square foot renovated warehouse in Tangent.
It moved operations to Salem because there was nowhere else with a warehouse big enough to support its growth.
“There is nothing like that in Corvallis, or Albany or Tangent. We just couldn’t build anything there. We couldn’t support the number of people there. We didn’t really want to move so far because a lot of our people live in Eugene or Corvallis,” Hurst said.
Agility plans to employ 500 people to help produce 10,000 robots per year once the company reaches its maximum production. Hurst said Salem, and Oregon in general, was an easy choice for setting up the company’s central manufacturing hub, and it has been easy attracting qualified engineers and computer scientists.
He said many of Agility’s employees live in Portland, Albany and other cities in the Willamette Valley and commute to Salem, which is centrally located.
“I think most of the time when people think about going and working at a high-tech company, someone who is right on the cutting edge of what is possible right now, they expect to go to San Francisco, or New York,” Hurst said. “We’ve been able to recruit people who just don’t want the traffic and they don’t want the congestion. They want to get out to the mountains and the coast, and have that freedom that you get from being somewhere like Oregon but working in this high-tech area.”
Hurst said he views robots like the company’s Digit robot as the harbinger of a time period in human history when robots and people will eventually live side-by-side.
The robots, which are 5 feet, 9 inches tall, can carry up to 35 pounds and are designed to navigate in a human environment.
“It is going to allow the companies to do more than they could do before.” Hurst said. “That is what humanity has always done. That is what every labor saving device has done, which allows us to do more. And as a general trend, increase the quality of life across the board. That’s the goal.”
The robots are controlled by special fleet management software and are shaped similar to humans with legs, arms, a torso and a head.
“Every robot is connected to the cloud. You can see when a robot gets confused and has an error,” Hurst said. “Sometimes a person can log in remotely and solve the confusion or the problem the robot might have.”
Hurst said the company is working on integrating artificial intelligence into the robots so that they can receive, understand and act on verbal commands from humans in addition to navigating stairs and doorways in a human environment.
At this point in its evolution, Digit can lift up and move totes in a warehouse facility, a task that Hurst said has proven difficult for major companies like Amazon to hire humans for.
“It’s the kind of thing where you pick up a tote off of a shelf and you put it on a conveyor belt, and the warehouse management system tells you which tote is ready to pick up and you pick up the tote and put it on the thing,” Hurst said .”You are not allowed to wear headphones and listen to music because of safety, and there is no one else around you so you are alone. It is a big windowless, very noisy warehouse. It is a robotic job. And that is reflected by the fact that they can’t hire people for it.”
The new facility is located within the Mill Creek Corporate Center, an industrial site where over the past decade city officials and economic development groups have promoted the construction of distribution centers and warehouses.
Erik Andersson, president of SEDCOR, the Salem-area economic development nonprofit, said Agility’s arrival in Salem is a sign of the city’s success in creating a desirable environment with investment potential. He said he is impressed with Agility’s effort to fit in with Salem’s existing business community.
“The exciting thing to me is their willingness to talk to local businesses about supplier opportunities. They need high-tech precision machine shops, they need 3D printers, and other types of infrastructure that we have here in the region,” Andersson said. “Our hopes are that there may come a time where some of our warehouse and distribution companies here will say, ‘Hey, maybe it would be a good opportunity to work with Agility on getting some of their Digit product in here.’”
The area also includes an Amazon distribution warehouse and a Dollar General warehouse that is currently under construction.
Andersson said Amazon’s arrival at Mill Creek was a major turning point for the area. It’s within one of Oregon’s enterprise zones which offer businesses a three year property tax abatement that can be extended depending on the number of jobs created and the salaries of those jobs.
“We are in a position now where we’ve got some good real estate to be able to show businesses that they can move in relatively quickly and we have developers that are willing to put different types of walls in or move some space around to be as flexible as they can within the walls they put up,” Andersson said.
Clarification: This story was updated to clarify the company’s timeline for mass robot production. The company plans to begin making robots at the Salem factory by the end of the year and will scale up to mass production gradually.
Contact reporter Joe Siess: [email protected] or 503-335-7790.
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Joe Siess is a reporter for Salem Reporter. Joe joined Salem Reporter in 2024 and primarily covers city and county government but loves surprises. Joe previously reported for the Redmond Spokesman, the Bulletin in Bend, Klamath Falls Herald and News and the Malheur Enterprise. He was born in Independence, MO, where the Oregon Trail officially starts, and grew up in the Kansas City area.