Agility’s new humanoid robot will stop, squat to avoid harming human coworkers

Agility’s leadership has consistently talked about safety as a crucial constraining factor in putting humanoid robots to work, despite being one of the humanoid robotics industry’s early movers. The robotics company, headquartered in Salem, became the first to deploy humanoid robots in full-time commercial operations at a GXO warehouse in Atlanta in 2024.

Since that time, earlier versions of the Digit robot have accumulated more than 65,000 hours working at warehouses and factories across North America. Clients that have piloted or deployed the Digit robots include GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. “The robot was designed with a complex safe motion system that can take a variety of different mitigations depending on exactly what sort of human presence is detected,” Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer at Agility, told Ars.

Customers can expect to gain early access to the Digit 5 within the first half of 2027, with the robot becoming generally available by the end of that year, according to Agility’s announcement today. Agility has been retooling its RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon, to produce its newest humanoid robot. Digit 5 uses AI algorithms along with an onboard set of multimodal sensors to detect people in its proximity, Velagapudi said. Although he declined to reveal exactly what types of sensors the robot uses to monitor nearby humans, he described the array as consisting of “a few different types of vision-based sensors.”

Agility’s newest humanoid robot uses Nvidia’s Thor IGX hardware, which provides AI compute for robots and medical devices, along with integrating the Nvidia Halos for Robotics system that provides a software stack for robotics safety applications.