Humanoid robots like Digit and Apollo are expanding beyond Amazon warehouses

In brief: Amazon isn't the only company filling its warehouses with humanoid robots – much to the concern of real human workers. GXO Logistics, a global contract logistics company that provides supply chain services to businesses around the world, is also testing these autonomous machines in its facilities.

GXO Logistics signed a multi-year agreement with Agility Robotics last year to begin deploying Digit in its operations. Digit, you may recall, is the 5-foot 9-inch, 140-pound humanoid robot that Amazon first introduced into its warehouses in 2023.

Digit can walk forward, backward, and sideways, squat and bend, and move, grasp, and handle items using its arm/hand-like clasps. It also sports 360-degree lidar, camera, and other sensors for autonomous navigation and obstacle detection.

Digit is working at the GXO-operated Spanx warehouse in Atlanta, where it moves heavy containers from a 6 River Systems robot to a conveyor belt.

GXO is also in the process of testing robots from Apptronik. In February, the robot maker announced a pilot partnership with American firm Jabil to test its Apollo humanoid robots. Jabil agreed to begin producing the robots in its factories, meaning that these robots could eventually be put to work building more of themselves.

GXO is also testing Apollo with an unnamed customer, though it is still determining how best to use the machine. Apollo is 5-foot 8-inches tall, weighs 160 pounds, has a 4-hour-per-battery-pack runtime, and a 55-pound payload.

Another robot GXO is using comes from Reflex – the two companies signed a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) agreement last September. Reflex's machine is less humanoid looking than the other two, though it still has arms and a head that move up and down its lengthy "torso," which is connected to a base on wheels. It's said to become fully autonomous by learning from human demonstrations over time.

"Just wait until we take over, meatbags"

Adrian Stoch, GXO's chief automation officer, told Business Insider that the company was in talks with four other vendors who make humanoid robots.

"It's a risk-free proposition for them, and they're able to bring in their technology, implement it outside of the normal core process, and we provide feedback from our operators and my team," Stoch said. "Then we partner with the vendors to go through improvements."

GXO's robot experiment is still in its early stages – just two Digit units are deployed in one of the company's more than 1,000 warehouses. However, Stoch said wide-scale deployment would happen in less than a decade. The main issues right now are improving their dexterity and ability to learn multiple tasks through AI.

Companies usually roll out the line that robots aren't meant to replace human workers, just assist them by doing monotonous, repetitive, and dangerous tasks. But Damion Shelton, CEO of Agility Robotics, appeared to say the quiet part out loud in 2023, claiming that the health of businesses using these robots was far more important than any "perceived fears about job replacement." Amazon, incidentally, reported a net income of $30.4 billion in 2023.