Red Rabbit Robotics made an appearance at the Humanoids Summit this week – a conference for builders making machines resembling people and selling autonomous labor as a service.
Imagine Amazon Mechanical Turk, but the output is on-premises and physical rather than digital data. In short, Red Rabbit is selling robot workers – initially remote-controlled, but eventually autonomous.
That’s unremarkable, given the long history of factory automation and industrial robots. But just as mainframes gave way to personal computers, Red Rabbit’s ambition comes at a time when robots – empowered by machine learning models – are poised to become personal and broadly capable. They’re ready for roles more challenging than cleaning floors.
The startup, co-founded by Lingkang Zhang (CEO) and David Goldberg (COO), has developed and open sourced a robot called RX1 that consists of a mechanical torso. And if you’re, say, running an assembly line that requires the manipulation of product parts, automating some part of that process may be less cost-prohibitive than it has been.
“We’re building autonomous labor as a service,” explained Goldberg in an interview with The Register. “A lot of companies, either in manufacturing, supply chain, or commercial applications, are constrained by a labor shortage.
“You have a lot of jobs that are repetitive. They’re either dull, dangerous, or dirty, and they have a very difficult time hiring people for that and retaining them – and with those people doing a reliable job. And those people are expensive.
“So the more dull the job is, the more dangerous it is, the more you have to incentivize people to want to do the job, and so therefore, wages go up. Inflation is also probably not helping.
“And so really what we’re trying to do is help fill the labor shortage for those types of jobs, drive the cost of labor down – to half what it is now – while achieving productivity output gains.”
If a robot’s working 24/7, and is three times as productive as a human equivalent working eight hours a day, then you should be able to, for half the cost, get three times the productivity and not worry about the labor shortage
According to Deloitte, 3.8 million new manufacturing employees will be needed by 2033, but “around half of these open jobs (1.9 million) could remain unfilled if manufacturers are not able to address the skills gap and the applicant gap.”
“If you think about it, there’s no reason why these robots can’t work 24/7,” observed Goldberg. “You probably have to figure out power supply and stuff like that, but those things are easy, relatively easy to solve.
“And so if a robot’s working 24/7, and is three times as productive as a human equivalent working eight hours a day, then you should be able to, for half the cost, get three times the productivity and not worry about the labor shortage. So that’s really where we’re trying to go.”
The Register asked Goldberg if he sees this taking away specific jobs, or is it more about removing the most onerous responsibilities faced by employees?
“We see this being an enabler of people being able to focus more on work they want to do and less on work that they have to do – such as moving boxes from place to place, or the same repetitive task over and over again where you develop carpal tunnel syndrome.”
Initially though, a person will still be doing this repetitive motion – just not directly.
Goldberg explained, “We have an existing pilot customer, where our core team is teleoperating the robot at first. This ensures we can refine the UX prior to releasing the software for others to use.”
The plan, he added, is to transition from manual teleoperation to semi-autonomous, to fully autonomous over time.
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We asked what it requires in terms of a company maintaining robots. Does Red Rabbit do the main