LIVE FROM MWC25 BARCELONA: Robots have made their mark across industrial settings to perform various automated tasks but in the not-too-distant future they will find their way into homes, according to Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics.

In a keynote, Johnson credited the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT for boosting humanoid robots’ capabilities while also drastically reducing the time it takes to train them for specific tasks.

Johnson explained US-based Agility Robotics is now able to overlay AI on to a robot to “supercharge its power”.

Using an iPad and voice commands, Johnson put a robot named Digit through its paces by instructing it to put certain coloured items into a bin. “Pick and place” robotics is handy for automating tasks in a warehouse or logistics centre, but AI allows users to train a robot on the fly.

“We use it to build a workflow,” she said. “That’s a laborious job for an engineer, to write a programme and to tell Digit exactly what to do. Now I can use a voice command.”

Non-recurring engineering for compute vastly shortens the time it takes to get a robot to function properly.

Johnson mistakenly asked Digit to put a white rope coil in a bin but since there was not one of that colour, it substituted a red one.

“That outsmarted me,” Johnson said.

In this instance, Johnson used Google’s Gemini 2.0 model to instruct Digit, but she says some AI models perform better than others at certain tasks.

“All the models operate slightly differently, and they’re all building their robotics foundation models, which is why we became agnostic,” she said. “We just wanted to swap in whichever one is working best for whatever use case you want.”

She described Digit as a robot that is augmenting a person’s job, which means a human is always part of the process. The robots are trained in labs separate from humans in case something goes wrong.

“It is a multi-purpose, human-centric robot. Some people say, why is it in human shape? It’s because it goes where spaces were built for humans.”

While the goal is to have the humanoid robots operating within homes for jobs such as doing laundry or cooking, Johnson said there are currently no governing bodies or regulations in place.

While robots function well within the structured confines of a factory, a home has many variables such as dogs, children and other obstacles in play.

The industry needs to “solve for safety” she said, before robots are in houses

“We’re going to demo safety before the end of this year,” she said. “The next step then is getting into the homes, but homes are chaotic.”