The Pulse
Agility unveils Digit 5 for barrier-free industrial work
Agility Robotics has unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid robot designed to work near people without traditional physical safety barriers. The company says the robot can lift 50-pound loads, work more than 20 hours per day and begin early customer
AI.info Team ·
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, presenting its next humanoid robot as a machine designed to work near people without the physical barriers used around conventional industrial automation.
The Salem, Oregon-based company says Digit 5 is built for manufacturing, warehousing and logistics. It combines a new safety system with higher lifting capacity, faster charging, interchangeable tools and a reach designed for facilities built around human workers.
“Digit 5 is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments,” said Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. “We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors.”
Digit 5 moves beyond the workcell
Agility’s earlier commercial deployments placed Digit 4 inside physical workcells that separated the robot from employees when its movement or balance created a risk. Digit 5 is designed to operate in the same industrial space as people while maintaining a safe distance, a capability Agility calls cooperative safety.
The robot uses proprietary artificial-intelligence algorithms, multiple sensor types and an independent safety controller to monitor nearby people. When the system detects a person within an unsafe distance, Digit 5 can avoid the person, stop moving or assume a seated position, according to the company.
Agility has also added visual and auditory safety cues intended to communicate the robot’s movement and alert nearby workers. The company says Digit 5 builds on an independent field evaluation of Digit on a customer production line for industrial safety standards administered by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
NVIDIA is supplying part of the new safety stack. Agility is the first launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics platform and is pairing its system with NVIDIA IGX Thor hardware and Halos Core infrastructure.
“Safely operating around people and assets is what moves humanoid robots from pilots to industrial deployments at scale,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at NVIDIA.
Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI, NVIDIA
A 50-pound payload and a nine-minute charge
Digit 5 can repeatedly lift loads of up to 50 pounds, a 40% increase over the previous generation, Agility says. The company attributes the higher capacity to a redesigned leg system and proprietary cycloidal actuators intended for repetitive lifting.
Its battery provides 90 minutes of runtime and can recharge in nine minutes, producing a stated 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio. Agility says that balance allows more than 20 hours of productive work during a 24-hour day, although the robot still requires repeated charging periods.
Digit 5 weighs 284 pounds and stands 5 feet 11 inches tall. It can reach up to 7.2 feet, compared with 5.5 feet for Digit 4, while retaining a footprint intended for aisles, doorways and workstations designed for people.
The robot also uses interchangeable end-effectors mounted through ISO-standard flanges. Agility says operators will be able to change tools for different jobs, including tote handling and machine tending, rather than relying on one general-purpose gripper for every workflow.
From tote handling to full-facility workflows
Digit 4 has focused mainly on moving totes in commercial facilities. Agility says Digit 5 is intended to cover a wider chain of tasks: depalletizing goods at receiving, tending machines, kitting and sequencing components, inspecting items and palletizing finished shipments.
The company’s Arc cloud platform coordinates Digit with autonomous mobile robots, conveyors and warehouse systems. Arc provides visibility into metrics such as uptime, throughput and mean time between incidents while connecting with warehouse-management, warehouse-execution and manufacturing-execution systems.
Agility says the expansion is based on more than 65,000 hours of Digit 4 operation across customer sites in North America, including deployments involving GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. At GXO’s Flowery Branch facility near Atlanta, Digit 4 has moved 100,000 totes with approximately 98% accuracy while on task, according to the company.
Orders precede commercial availability
Agility says it had secured more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 customer orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones. The company also points to a pipeline of prospective customers in manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, but has not identified those customers in the launch announcement.
Digit 5 will be assembled at RoboFab, Agility’s 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem. The factory is designed to produce up to 10,000 robots per year at full capacity and employ more than 500 people, according to the company.
Agility plans to offer Digit 5 outside North America for the first time, beginning with the European Union and the United Kingdom. The company expects the robot to carry a CE mark and additional regulatory marks for those markets.
Early access is expected to begin in the first half of 2027, with general availability for manufacturing, warehouse and distribution operators expected by the end of 2027. Until then, Digit 5 remains a product announcement backed by existing Digit deployments, customer commitments and a safety architecture that Agility says will allow humanoid robots to leave the fenced workcell.