For decades, if you walked into a major factory or warehouse, heavy machinery was strictly locked behind high wire fencing or light curtains to stop it from accidentally causing serious injuries or even death to human workers. Sometimes those machines came with a long list of safety precautions and are only operated by trained experts.
Well, industrial robots are finally stepping out of their cages and Agility Robotics is leading the charge.
Enter Agility Robotics’ Digit 5
In the era where humanoids are running into glitches when carrying out their daily tasks like delivering packages, Agility Robotics is officially tearing down those physical barricades with the reveal of its next-gen humanoid robot Digit 5.
Designed as the company’s first humanoid for “cooperatively safe work at scale,” Digit 5 is built specifically to work right alongside human teammates on production and factory floors. What is more interesting is that both man and robot can work together without needing giant protective safety barriers.
Customer feedback led to breakthrough innovation
Taking lessons learned from three years and over 65,000 hours of real-world operational deployments with its predecessor, Digit 4, Agility Robotics built Digit 5 directly around customer feedback. The market has already responded in a huge way, handing Agility over $300 million in multi-year customer orders across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.
Breaking the cage with smart safety tech
How do you get a 284-pound metal worker to move safely around people? It comes down to a brand-new, multi-layered safety architecture.
Aside from being the first humanoid robot to pass an independent field evaluation for OSHA-administered industrial safety standards, Digit 5 also adds a suite of proactive hardware and physical AI guardrails such as:
- Safe human detection: Using proprietary AI algorithms and multi-sensor systems, Digit 5 continuously monitors its surroundings for nearby people. If a person gets too close, it autonomously avoids them, stops in its tracks, or even sits down on the spot.
- Independent safety controllers: A dedicated safe motion control system acts as a built-in supervisor. The second anyone enters an unsafe distance, it instantly triggers protective maneuvers.
- Clear safety cues: Digit 5 uses visual and auditory cues to telegraph its motion intent, giving human co-workers an easy way to understand what it’s about to do next.
- NVIDIA integration: Agility is partnering with tech giants and serves as the primary launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics platform, running its safety framework on top of NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos Core infrastructure.
Agility isn’t just following rules, it’s actively shaping them. The company is helping draft ANSI/A3 TR R15.108, the technical safety standard for dynamically stable mobile industrial robots across the U.S. and Canada.
Muscle upgrades: Heavy lifting and higher reach
Safety isn’t the only thing getting a massive upgrade. Agility gave Digit 5 serious hardware juice to cover full facility workflows, expanding far beyond the simple tote-handling jobs of earlier generations.
Digit 5 stands at 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 284 lbs (129 kg). The robot is proportioned to fit human spaces and easily navigates the exact same paths, doorways and workstations built for real human workers.
Key physical specs include:
- 40% more payload capacity: Powered by proprietary cycloidal actuator technology and a new leg design built for repetitive lifting, Digit 5 can repeatedly carry loads up to 50 lbs (22.7 kg). That covers single-person lift limits under OSHA standards.
- Extended reach: Digit 5 can now reach up to 7.2 feet (2.2 m) high which is a huge bump from its predecessor. Digit 4 has a 5.5-foot limit. Digit 5’s upgraded reach lets it reach top shelves easily.
- Swappable grippers: Featuring ISO-standard mounting flanges, the robot’s hands can be quickly swapped out for different jobs, ranging from grabbing plastic totes to machine-tending tasks.
Non-stop productivity: 20 hours of work a day
One of the biggest pain points in industrial robotics is battery downtime. If a robot spends half its shift sitting at a charger, that time is spent not working. Agility tackled this problem by revamping Digit 5’s power delivery.
The humanoid has a 90-minute runtime battery system paired with a supercharged 9-minute fast charge capability. That raises Digit 5’s run-to-charge ratio up to a staggering 10:1 (compared to Digit 4’s modest 2:1 ratio). In plain English? Digit 5 can handle over 20 hours of productive work in a standard 24-hour day, spending way more time on the floor and far less time charging.
Taking over the full factory floor
By pairing physical AI capability training with its Agility Arc cloud platform, Agility is setting up Digit 5 to handle end-to-end operational tasks.
Instead of sitting in one spot doing one repetitive trick, a single Digit 5 can unload goods, boxes or materials from a loaded pallet and perform machine tending, manage kitting and sequencing, conduct quality inspections and hand off materials to existing Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) or conveyor belts.
Where can you get one?
Digit 5 is built at RoboFab, Agility’s 70,000-square-foot factory in Salem, Oregon. The factory is capable of churning out up to 10,000 humanoids annually. Early access for select customer partners kicks off in the first half of 2027, with general availability for warehouses, factories, and distribution hubs targeted by late 2027.
Plus, Agility plans to bring Digit 5 to international markets, complete with CE marking for deployment in the UK and European Union.