Toyota Canada has signed a deal with a U.S. robotics firm for humanoid robots “to support employees with manufacturing, supply chain and logistics operations” in its Woodstock assembly plant.
Agility Robotics’ humanlike bot ‘Digit,’ has been used by Amazon, logistics-solutions company GXO, and motion-technology firm Schaeffler, among others.
Neither company would disclose the value of the deal.
The agreement follows a yearlong pilot and testing period with three robots, and it will see seven ‘Digits’ at the Woodstock, plant, said Agility spokesperson Tim Smith.
“Digit’s task is to feed totes of automotive parts to the assembly line via loading and unloading an automated tugger,” Smith said. “Digit takes empty totes off the tugger, then puts full ones back on.”
Toyota also has two plants in Cambridge, which are not set to receive robots.
The robots — standing five-foot-nine, with the ability bend, walk, lift and move objects — are “absolutely not” meant to replace workers, Toyota Canada spokesperson Michael Bouliane told the Star.
“Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada employs 8,500 highly skilled Canadians, and has never laid off a full-time employee in its entire history,” he said.
“We have been adding automation to our plants for 40 years, including more than 500 automated delivery robots we already have assisting with internal logistics, and this has only resulted in increased employment as we continue to be Canada’s largest automotive manufacturer,” Bouliane added.
The robots’ tasks are “not directly related to assembling a vehicle,” but are repetitive tasks such as moving totes full of parts from one rack to another, he said.
According to the announcement, the companies will continue to assess how robots and AI could further increase automotive production, and how automating “extremely repetitive and physically taxing tasks” could improve safety for employees and allow them to do “more value-added work” in the plants.
With the use of AI, the robot can also “continually learn tasks and adapt to new manufacturing workflows,” it said.
Agility says its mission is to “build robot partners that augment the human workforce, ultimately enabling humans to be more human.”
Brendan Sweeney, managing director of Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing, said assembly plants generally have thousands of robots.
“The automotive industry is, by some margin, the number one consumer, user, adopter, of robots because it’s repetitive work,” he said. “A vehicle assembly plant is making one car a minute, and there might be 2,000 different steps to making that car.”
In his view, the Toyota deal is “largely in response to employee health and safety,” and robots there are “doing jobs that people would prefer not to.”
It could make workers available to do more interesting work that’s “a little easier on their bodies over time, but puts their brain to work,” he said.
Sweeney, who said he has tracked employment at automotive assembly plants going back to the 1990s, said Toyota tends to retain workers at its non-unionized plants long-term.
By contrast, General Motors recently announced it would be cutting 1,200 workers amid U.S. tariffs on automotive imports, and Stellantis Canada has “paused” operations at its Brampton plant.
Workers at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis are all unionized and represented by Unifor.
A report published this month by the Trillium Network for Advanced Manufacturing found unionization among the plants in Canada has declined to about 33 per cent — a “precipitous decrease” over the last decade — as the share of employment at Japan-based automakers has increased and the share of employment at U.S.-based automakers has decreased.
