Agility Robotics said its robot can cost customers $200,000 and break even with their purchase within 1.1 years.
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How much would it cost to employ a humanoid robot in a factory?Agility Robotics gave us one of the clearest answers yet.In a securities filing on Tuesday, the Oregon-based robotics company provided a glimpse into the economics behind its two-legged robot, Digit.Under one business model outlined in the filing, a customer buying the company's next-generation Digit v5 would pay about $200,000 for the robot itself, plus a roughly $20,000 onetime deployment fee. Afterward, software and maintenance would run about $36,000 a year per bot.Add that up over a five-year "useful life of Digit" assumed by Agility, and the tab for one humanoid robot comes to about $400,000.The figures are "illustrative" estimates that Agility used to model Digit's economics, and do not reflect the cost a real-life customer would pay. The company wrote in the filing that contracts are subject to negotiation. Agility also didn't say that Digit would stop working after five years — only that it assumed a five-year useful life period for the purpose of its model.Still, Agility says the math could work out in a customer's favor pretty quickly."Based on our current planning assumptions, Digit v5 is expected to achieve customer breakeven in approximately 1.1 years," the filing said, citing productivity, uptime, and availability of workers as factors in its calculation.
