Agility Robotics Unveils Digit 5, a Humanoid Built to Work Near People Without Barriers

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on Sept. 15, the next generation of its humanoid robot. The company says it’s the first Digit built to work close to people without the safety barriers that have kept earlier versions fenced off in warehouses and factories. Digit 5 is expected to be available in North America in the first half of 2027, followed by the European Union and the UK later that year, Business Insider reported.

“Digit 5 is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments,” CEO Peggy Johnson said in Agility’s announcement. “We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors.” She said the company has more than $300 million in multi-year orders.

Stop, slow down or sit

The new safety system uses AI and multiple sensors to watch for people. When someone gets too close, the robot avoids them, stops or lowers itself into a seated position. If a person keeps approaching, it can get down on the ground and shut off its motors, BI reported. Lights and sounds signal what the robot is about to do, and an independent safety controller triggers the response. Agility is the first launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics platform, which runs on NVIDIA IGX Thor. The company is also helping write humanoid safety standards, ANSI/A3 TR R15.108 and ISO 25785-1.

Heavier lifting, shorter charging

• Payload: A new leg design with Agility’s cycloidal actuators lets Digit 5 repeatedly lift loads up to 50 lb (22.7 kg), about 40% more than Digit 4. The backward-bending knees are gone. “We don’t need to run a marathon with this robot,” cofounder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst told BI. “We need to lift heavy things.”
• Charging: A 90-minute battery charges in 9 minutes at a dock, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio (up from 2:1). Agility says that allows more than 20 hours of work a day.
• Size: Digit 5 stands 5 ft 11 in (1.81 m), weighs 284 lb (129 kg) and can reach up to 7.2 ft (2.2 m).
• Tools: Swappable grippers on ISO-standard mounts let it switch between jobs like tote handling and machine tending.

The business case

Agility says Digit robots are deployed at nine customer facilities in North America, with customers including Amazon, Toyota and GXO. The company is still unprofitable. A securities filing showed $1.8 million in 2025 net sales and a $140 million operating loss. It plans to go public through a SPAC deal valuing it at about $2.5 billion. In one illustrative model from the filing, a customer pays about $200,000 per Digit 5, plus a roughly $20,000 deployment fee and $36,000 a year for software and maintenance, or about $400,000 per robot over five years. Agility said real contracts are negotiated individually.

Better-funded rivals, including Figure AI and Tesla, are racing to get their own humanoids into factories. Agility is betting that being safe to work beside, rather than having the most robots or the lowest price, will win industrial buyers.