Introducing Phoenix, a humanoid robot aiming to tackle labour challenges

The system is designed to give Phoenix human-like intelligence and enable it to do a wide range of work to help address the labour challenges affecting many organisations today.

“We designed Phoenix to be the most sensor-rich and physically capable humanoid ever built and to enable Carbon’s rapidly growing intelligence to perform the broadest set of work tasks possible,” said Geordie Rose, Co-Founder and CEO, Sanctuary AI. “We see a future where general-purpose robots are as ubiquitous as cars, helping people to do work that needs doing, in cases where there simply aren’t enough people to do that work.”

Sanctuary AI’s main emphasis is on creating a technology that can conduct physical work just like a person.

“To be general-purpose, a robot needs to be able to do nearly any work task, the way you’d expect a person to, in the environment where the work is,” said Rose. “While it is easy to get fixated on the physical aspects of a robot, our view is that the robot is just a tool for the real star of the show, which in our case is our proprietary AI control system, the robot’s Carbon-based mind.”

In March, Sanctuary AI finished its first commercial deployment and announced it was going to take an open and collaborative approach to establishing a fresh AI and robotics ecosystem. To achieve this, the company assembled a collection of vendors and partners — including Apptronik, Bell, Common Sense Machines, Contoro, Cycorp, Exonetik, HaptX, Magna, Tangible Research, Verizon Ventures, and Workday Ventures.

In the previous spring, the company successfully concluded of its Series A funding cycle. Moving forward to November, the company secured $30 million injection from the Government of Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), elevating Sanctuary AI's funding beyond the $100 million mark.

About Phoenix

• Human-like form and function: standing at 5’ 7” and weighing 155 lbs
• Maximum payload of 55lbs
• Maximum speed of 3mph
• Industry-leading robotic hands with increased degrees of freedom (20 in total) that rival human hand dexterity and fine manipulation with proprietary haptic technology that mimics the sense of touch
• Improved aesthetics with a bolder colour palette and elevated textures

About Carbon

• A cognitive architecture and software platform for humanoid general-purpose robots
• Integrates modern AI technologies to translate natural language into action in the real world
• Enables Phoenix to think and act to complete tasks like a person
• Explainable and auditable reasoning, task, and motion plans
• Symbolic and logical reasoning coupled with modern LLMs (for general knowledge), domain-specific integrations, and extensions
• Agency and goal-seeking behaviours
• Uses Deep Learning & Reinforcement Learning
• Photo-realistic and physics-realistic world simulations for robot training
• Human-in-the-loop supervision, teleoperation, and fleet management