Almond Wants to Put Their Dual-Arm Axol Robot on Your Assembly Line

“Physical AI” is a hot buzzword right now and our social media feeds are flooded with videos of humanoid robots doing flips and kicking small children with surprising frequency. But while those tech demos are cool and full humanoid robots do have a place in the world, they aren’t ready for real work yet. That’s why Almond built the dual-arm Axol robot and they think it can jump into your assembly line right now.

Almond is a Bay Area startup and their target market is other Bay Area startups. Axol is not a complete humanoid robot — it doesn’t even have legs. But that is fine, because it is affordable, it has two versatile arms, and it is ready today. Instead of trying to drive up their valuation with big promises and deceptive demos, Almond is building a practical robot for doing real tasks in the real world.

At least that’s the pitch.

Does Axol live up to that promise? On paper, the specs look compelling. Each arm has seven degrees of freedom and together they have a total reach of 860mm. The marketing materials says the “peak payload” is 6.5kg, though 2kg per arm seems to be the actual working payload, which is still very respectable. There are GMSL 2.0 passthrough connections on the wrist, for mounting high-performance cameras with machine vision in mind. And Axol robots are assembled in San Francisco.

That’s all pretty promising and the only thing I see to cause hesitation is the construction. At least as presented, Axol is clearly built from off-the-shelf aluminum extrusion, steel tube, and 3D-printed plastic. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps costs down and allows for fast iteration. But it does give the product a kind of DIY feel.

Balancing that out is the open source SDK. I think that was a smart choice on Almond’s part, because it reduces some of the anxiety associated with purchasing from a new startup. If Almond fails, the Axol robots in the wild should still be usable. On top of that, Almond offers repair services in the Bay Area, which should give buyers some peace of mind.

You can order an Axol from the first batch right now for $7,999 (the full kit, with base, three Zed X One S cameras, and Zed Box Orin NX 16GB computer, costs $11,999). That is very affordable and means Axol might just be worth taking a chance on, while the rest of the world waits indefinitely for practical humanoid robots.