{"id":63752,"date":"2026-07-17T16:55:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/?p=63752"},"modified":"2026-07-17T16:55:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T20:55:35","slug":"agility-robotics-training-hub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/agility-robotics-training-hub\/","title":{"rendered":"Agility Robotics Opens Robot Training Hub in Tesla\u2019s California Backyard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agility Robotics<\/a> is opening a 60,000-square-foot training facility for its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, placing the company just miles from the factory where Tesla<\/a> is expected to begin manufacturing its Optimus humanoid later this year. The move positions two of the most closely watched companies in the humanoid robotics race in the same industrial corridor, but with markedly different strategies for getting their machines into the workforce.<\/p>\n

Digit Already Generating Revenue While Tesla Prepares Optimus<\/h2>\n

Tesla has placed an enormous bet on Optimus. Elon Musk<\/a> has described it as having the potential to be “the biggest product ever,” with usefulness “outside of Tesla sometime next year.” But while Tesla commands vastly greater capital and attention, Agility already has a robot generating real-world revenue. Its bipedal robot, Digit, is currently carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. The company reports that it has secured $300 million in contract orders.<\/p>\n

“It’s great to have them in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone, and it’s good to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system.”<\/p>\n

Agility has not disclosed the number of Digits it has built or deployed, though outside estimates suggest dozens have been involved in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company has stated that Digits have moved over 100,000 totes at a single GXO logistics facility.<\/p>\n

A Practical Approach to Autonomy in a Crowded Field<\/h2>\n

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse merger expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques enabling robots to walk safely on two legs, Agility is working to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI<\/a>a-inspired competitors such as Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, and Sunday Robotics.<\/p>\n

The arrival of transformer-based neural networks that underpin large language models offers the promise of major advances in robotic behavior, but Agility is taking a deliberately measured approach. “When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don’t want the anti-lock brake controller under AI control,” said co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton. “The analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that’s not generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack.”<\/p>\n

Where AI does play a transformative role for Agility is in scaling the robot’s useful capabilities. “One of the first times Bruce Leak asked us how we were going to go about coding applications for the robot, we didn’t really have a good answer,” Shelton said, referring to the QuickTime inventor who serves on Agility’s board. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far larger than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI answers that question definitively.”<\/p>\n

New Facility Accelerates Skill Training and Customer Deployments<\/h2>\n

The new Fremont facility is designed to accelerate the deployment pipeline. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in active talks about deploying Digit. The center will be used to train the six-foot-tall robot in environments that closely mimic real-world conditions it will encounter in the field, allowing it to learn new skills before being shipped to customer sites.<\/p>\n

Unlike many newer entrants to the humanoid space, Agility is not planning to offer an in-home robot anytime soon \u2014 a view aligned with most independent robotics experts, who believe today’s most capable robots remain insufficiently safe for consumer environments. Digit currently operates in human-free zones, but the upcoming Version 5, expected to be unveiled this fall, will include the ability to sense humans and will no longer require a robot-only workspace.<\/p>\n

Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst emphasized that the company sees more than enough work in manufacturing and logistics alone. “Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” Hurst said. “And then let’s like start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Okay, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”<\/p>\n

What This Means for the Humanoid Robotics Landscape<\/h2>\n

Agility’s expansion into Tesla’s backyard is more than a geographic coincidence. It signals that the humanoid robotics race is entering a phase where commercial deployment, not just prototype ambition, is the defining differentiator. While Tesla is still working toward production, Agility is scaling its training infrastructure, signing customer contracts, and preparing for a public listing \u2014 all with a robot that is already proving its utility in controlled industrial settings. For businesses evaluating humanoid automation, the practical lesson is that Digit is available now for structured tasks like material handling, and the company’s focus on safety and incremental capability expansion makes it a lower-risk entry point than waiting for a more general-purpose humanoid that remains years from deployment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot training facility for its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, placing the company just miles from the factory where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing its Optimus humanoid later this year. The move positions two of the most closely watched companies in the humanoid robotics race in the same industrial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":84081,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/63752.png","fifu_image_alt":"Agility Robotics Opens Robot Training Hub in Tesla\u2019s California Backyard","footnotes":""},"categories":[349],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-articles"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/63752.png","fifu_image_alt":"Agility Robotics Opens Robot Training Hub in Tesla\u2019s California Backyard","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}