Persona AI is focusing its humanoid robot on shipyard welding as its first task, first reported by Spectrum. The company sees a shortage of skilled workers and a need for hundreds of kilometers of linear welds per ship, while the labor constraints at its partnerships leave robots as a possible option when additional skilled labor does not exist.
A narrower entry point
Persona did not see economic viability in baseline unskilled human labor and instead formed its thesis around skilled trades and tool use. Its humanoid is intended to use the same handheld tools as humans, beginning with long, linear welds that are relatively uncomplicated.
Metal must melt before the weld advances, so the task’s top speed is an easily manageable centimeter per second. High-quality welds require millimeter-scale repeated motions that robots excel at over long periods, while humans tend to get tired or bored.
A capacity case for shipyards
Persona has two public partnerships: HD Hyundai, the world’s largest shipbuilder, and POSCO, the third-largest steel producer in the world; both are in Korea. The company declined to provide detail, but Radford said it is broadly interested in customers able to support hundreds of robots per location.
Shipyards also make a case for legs. Open-air yards can be a couple hundred meters long, with horizontal and vertical spars workers have to step over, and work can occur on the ground, overhead and through portholes. After considering four legs or more, Persona determined that two legs would be least disruptive to existing shipyard rhythms.
The commercial case is added capacity, not replacing humans. Persona says its current partnerships have significant backlogs and are labor-constrained, so the robots are meant to help customers build more ships; even a robot more expensive than a human could be valuable if it unlocked additional revenue.
The narrow task and the capacity argument put technical fit and labor scarcity in the same business case.
Shipyard welding is attractive partly because of a deficit of skilled, highly paid workers and taxing physical labor. Some safety concerns around bipedal robots are lessened because shipyard workers are trained to work around potentially dangerous industrial equipment, and Persona is less sensitive to competitive pricing because no other company is pursuing the use case.
Shipbuilding is a beachhead for grinding, painting and other fabrication. Expanding from welding will require tens of thousands of hours of expert demonstration data, high-fidelity simulations and real-world testing, and Persona still has to prove that its idea for an economically viable robotics company can be realized.