Is Shipyard Welding the Right First Job for Humanoid Robots?

Humanoids desperately need to stop making YouTube videos and get a job already, and Persona AI is one of the few humanoid companies which seems to be entirely focused on making that happen. Persona’s approach has been to carefully select a job that is economically viable for robots right now, and they’ve found one that was also the job of one of the very first industrial robots ever sold: welding.IEEE Spectrum first spoke with Persona two years ago, shortly after it was founded by Nic Radford and Jerry Pratt. Radford led NASA JSC’s Valkyrie program back in the day and was also the founder of Nauticus Robotics, while Pratt led IHMC’s DARPA Robotics Challenge team before spending a couple of years as CTO of Figure. The Challenge of HumanoidsAs of our first conversation in 2024, Persona had committed to building an economically viable humanoid, but they hadn’t yet figured out where their focus was going to be. “We were all over the place,” Radford says. “Warehousing, automotive, we probably even mentioned the home.” These are the same environments with the same sorts of potential applications that basically every other humanoid robotics company is attempting to make economically viable, and despite an ever more exhaustive number of demonstrations, so far none have succeeded at any sort of useful scale. The challenge for Persona, and really for every robotics company, is that it’s not enough that you have a robot that is simply capable of doing a task. It’s also not enough that your robot can do that task in a way that is efficient and reliable and safe. What’s required is that your robot can make money for both you and your customer. Most humanoid companies seek to achieve this by targeting baseline “unskilled” human labor.Persona did not see economic viability in the unskilled labor approach, Radford says. “We started forming this thesis around skilled trades and tool usage.” Persona is targeting much more expensive skilled labor with its robots, and the reason why this is feasible is because their entry point focuses on the kind of skills that robots are especially good at. “I like to call it ‘last-mover advantage.’ We’ve seen everything that everybody’s doing, and we’ve decided that there’s a different way.” Persona AI/YouTube A Humanoid for Shipyard WeldingThe first task that Persona’s humanoid is focusing on is welding—using a handheld tool to connect one piece of metal to another. “Tool use is pretty difficult,” Pratt says. “And we want to use the same tools that humans do, which makes it more difficult.” That difficulty is offset somewhat by the fact that Persona’s humanoid will first focus on making long, linear welds that are relatively uncomplicated. “This is not the hardest style of weld,” Radford says, “but in shipbuilding you need a lot of them—hundreds of kilometers of linear welds per ship.”Currently, Persona has two public partnerships: one with HD Hyundai, which is the world’s largest shipbuilder, and the other with POSCO, the third-largest steel producer in the world, both in Korea. Persona declined to get into detail, but Radford says that broadly speaking, the company is interested in customers who can support ‘hundreds’ of robots per location.Shipyard welding is an enticing application for Persona because there is a deficit of skilled (and highly paid) workers, it’s taxing physical labor, and it’s a comparatively easy skill for a humanoid to learn.The welding process is skilled in a very robot-friendly way. Because you can only weld as fast as metal melts, the top speed for the task is an easily manageable centimeter per second. And making a high quality weld involves millimeter-scale repeated motions, which robots excel at, especially over long periods of time—whereas humans tend to get tired or bored. Pratt expects that for these uncomplicated welds, performing on-par with humans—if not eventually better—will be achievable soon.Shipyards make a compelling case for a humanoid with legs, as opposed to a more stable wheeled base. “These open-air shipyards are a couple hundred meters long, with horizontal and vertical spars you have to step over all the time,” says Radford. “You’ve got to work on the ground, overhead, and through portholes.” Persona considered other form factors, like four legs (or even more), but determined a two-legged robot would be the least disruptive to existing shipyard rhythms.The Economic Viability of HumanoidsDeploying their robots in shipyards specifically brings additional advantages for Persona. The safety concerns that come with bipedal robots—such as potentially falling over on a human worker—are lessened because a shipyard environment is staffed with workers who are trained to work around potentially dangerous industrial equipment. The company is also less sensitive to competitive pricing because no other company is pursuing the use case. “We’re now in an industry where the value added by our robot can be high enough that we don’t have to cut corners on qual