These Industrial Robots Get More Adept With Every Task

At the offices of startup Vicarious in Union City, where the Bay Area's sprawl abuts rolling hills, 10 robot arms tirelessly place travel-sized beauty products into bins on a conveyor belt. Each gray arm ends in a suction-cup-tipped finger that makes a high pitched whine as it plucks items such as antiperspirant or hand lotion from crowded boxes. Vicarious buys standard industrial robots, enhances them with its software, and contracts them out the way a temp agency does workers--charging per task completed or at an hourly rate. In Baltimore, Vicarious robots assemble sampler packs for makeup company Sephora, work previously done exclusively by humans. Vicarious CEO and cofounder D. Scott Phoenix says the deal demonstrates his business model: Create artificial intelligence software that makes industrial robots smart enough to perform jobs previously done only by people.