Digit 5 Sets a New Bar for Humanoid Robot Safety
With its new Digit 5 robot, announced today, Agility Robotics may have found the sweet spot. Digit 5 is a humanoid worker that can lift 23 kilograms up 2.1 meters, can work in close proximity to people without relying on physical barriers, and can operate f...
Key takeaways
- Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, its newest humanoid worker, featuring redesigned legs, larger batteries and a layered safety system that can detect people, slow down, squat and shut off its motors to avoid contact; the company says the robot can lift 23 kg to 2.1 m, run for more than 20 hours a day and will be available to customers in the first half of 2027 with a pipeline of over $300 million in multi‑year orders and a production capacity that could reach about 1,000 units once its Oregon factory scales up.
- In parallel, Chinese embodied‑AI firm Spirit AI warned that robot “brains” remain the weakest link and projects a ChatGPT‑style breakthrough for humanoid cognition by mid‑2027, noting its current Moz1 wheeled humanoids are already used on production lines at CATL and JD.com and that its data‑training centre is collecting “dirty data” from dozens of humans performing everyday motions.
- The second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, held from 22‑26 August, gathered more than 2,000 robots from 16 nations to contest 51 events, setting new performance records such as a 9.44‑foot standing high jump and an 8.64‑second 100‑meter sprint by the Chinese Tiangong Ultra, while also testing practical tasks like package sorting and emergency response in mock homes and factories.
- Meanwhile, research groups and firms such as Figure AI and Helix 2.5 are demonstrating that scaling robot‑training data can dramatically improve zero‑shot generalization across dozens of homes, and analysts at RoboStrategy identify only three U.S. humanoid startups—Agility Robotics, Figure AI and Tesla’s Optimus program—as the most compelling pre‑IPO investment opportunities.
Buyer next steps
Compare source-backed options on HumanoidHub
Use HumanoidHub catalog records and buyer guides to verify robot availability, source links, and shortlist fit before contacting manufacturers.
With its new Digit 5 robot, announced today, Agility Robotics may have found the sweet spot. Digit 5 is a humanoid worker that can lift 23 kilograms up 2.1 meters, can work in close proximity to people without relying on physical barriers, and can operate for more than 20 hours a day. This combination of power, safety, and battery life has resulted in a 1.8 m tall, 129 kg robot that prioritizes functionality over style and pretty much everything else, but this is exactly what it’s going to take to get humanoids a job. Where does Digit 5 go from here? Today’s press release says that “as of May 2026, Agility had more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders for Digit 5, with a sales pipeline of prospective customers across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.” That works out to comfortably under 1,000 robots, one-tenth of the full capacity of Agility’s RoboFab factory in Oregon.
Between now and all those robots, however, lies an unpredictable entry into the stock market through what’s called a SPAC merger. That’s expected to close within the next few months. Agility hopes to raise more than $620 million through the merger, and it will primarily spend the money to scale production of Digit 5, and get it to customers. Those in the EU and the UK should be able to buy the bots in 2027. Despite the recent deluge of videos of humanoid robots doing backflips and kung-fu, the actual pace of progress towards humanoids that can do economically viable jobs at scale has at times seemed a bit plodding. There are some good reasons for this: a humanoid robot needs to be powerful enough to do useful work, safe enough for humans to walk past, and have enough battery life to limit how much of the day it’s hooked to a charger. But all three of those necessary features actively work against each other.
New robots, funding, and signals. Every Thursday.
Unsubscribe anytime.
Mentioned in this article