The Apollo humanoid robot is designed for a variety of applications. | Credit: Apptronik

While much of the focus on humanoid robots has been on entertaining demonstration videos and massive amounts of funds raised, the work of development and finding a value proposition is quietly continuing. How are humanoids progressing from prototypes to mass production? Jabil Inc., a design, supply chain, and manufacturing services provider, offered its perspective.

Companies preparing to ramp up production of humanoid robots include Tesla, 1X Technologies, XPeng, and UBTECH. Jabil works with robotics developers to bring their products to market at scale.

The St. Petersburg, Fla.-based company has worked with Apptronik on bringing its Apollo humanoid to active manufacturing environments. Thomas Brown, senior director for engineering and technology, including digital commerce and robotics, at Jabil, replied to the following questions from The Robot Report.

How are investor and customer expectations for mobile manipulators and humanoids evolving?

Brown: In terms of managing expectations, a lot of customers have gotten humanoids out in low volumes, but we are entering a phase of tens of thousands, where it’s no longer something that’s assembled by hand on site. You’re starting to get to where you need a cost structure, manufacturability, and to improve quality. These are areas where Jabil can really add a lot of value.

When a robot’s much more expensive, there’s only so many they can produce for gathering AI training data, and they need more customer use-case validation. We provide that ability to cost down their designs to actually hit those scales.

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