Rivian's New Robots Will Initially Handle 20% Of Factory Tasks. The Goal Is 80%, CEO Says

The automaker’s Mind Robotics spinoff is working on replacing boring, repetitive jobs with some sort of industrial robots.

Photo by: JerryRigEverything

By: Iulian Dnistran

Nov 11, at 7:49am ET

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Rivian wants robots to take over most of the workload in its car factories.
The goal is to have 80% of the plant work done by robots, but that will come in the future.
CEO RJ Scaringe said that robots will initially handle the posts where humans currently feed other robots.

Rivian, the California-based startup that makes the R1S, R1T, and R2 EVs, wants to flood its car factories with robots. In an interview with Kleiner Perkins, RJ Scaringe, the company’s founder and CEO, said that as much as 80% of the assembly line tasks will be automated, and it’s all thanks to the Mind Robotics spinoff established last year.

We don’t know when the robot revolution will hit Rivian’s factory floors, but Scaringe said that things will start off at a smaller scale.

“In the beginning, we’re going to be able to do 20% of the tasks on the plant, but over time, we want to grow that to 80%,” said Scaringe. “And that’s what makes software so exciting and why designing the hardware with headroom is so important.”

To be clear, the vast majority of car plants in the world, including Rivian’s, have some degree of automation. We’ve all seen those huge robot arms that pick up various parts and install them in fixed positions. These robots are manually programmed to do the same task over and over again, and they can only do their job if the parts they need are exactly in the same spot every time.

However, what Rivian—and others like it—aims to do in the future is replace humans who do highly repetitive tasks that have some degree of variability. At first, posts where humans simply pick up a part from a bin and place it on a fixture will be handled by AI-enabled robots that are able to detect small variations in where parts are placed inside the bin.

“These are the immediate opportunities we see,” said Scaringe. “And these tend to be the ones that often are the least interesting jobs. But there’s a huge body of work that exists there. Depending on the section of the plant, up to 50% of the labor is in pick-and-place [posts].”

Rivian R2 Assembly

Photo by: Rivian

To make it all happen, Rivian has worked closely with Mind Robotics, a startup that the EV maker spun off last year to develop autonomous driving and “physical AI.” Now, RJ Scaringe revealed that both companies have poached talent from the consumer electronics industry to work on Rivian’s future software and hardware plans.

“We have a lot of folks, both within Rivian and Mind, that we’ve recruited from consumer electronics. Like, if you’re working on a tactile-sensing phone, how is that helpful on a robot? Well, a robot needs to have tactile sensing. So, there are these deep capabilities that have been built into the consumer electronics space that we’ve leveraged within Rivian, and we’re leveraging with Mind,” said Scaringe.

In practice, engineers filmed how various tasks are completed on the factory floor and then fed those videos into software that can decode what’s happening in each frame. Then, the software can issue commands to the robot.

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“In the case of manufacturing, what we’ve done within Mind, we’ve taken videos of a whole broad spectrum of tasks. So, thousands of tasks being done, characterized what’s in those tasks, what’s the degree of difficulty from a dexterity point of view and a reasoning point of view,” said Rivian’s CEO. With the proper hardware in place, the software can then be improved over time. "The model gets smarter over time,” added Scaringe.

That’s similar to what the company aims to do with its Gen2 R1S and R1T electric models. The two EVs are equipped with all of the necessary hardware to enable point-to-point hands-free driving, while the software that ties it all together is scheduled to become available on a small scale through an over-the-air software update in late 2026, followed by a wider rollout in 2027.