Agility’s Digit 5 Sits Down Rather Than Risk Falling on a Coworker
On 15 September 2026, Agility Robotics introduced a new robot called Digit 5. The big news is not clever hands or smart software. The robot is built so it cannot fall on a person. The magazine IEEE Spectrum got the details from Agility. Digit 5 can lift 23 kilograms (about 50 pounds) as high as 2.1 meters. It can work more than 20 hours a day. It can work beside people with no safety fence. It stands 1.8 meters tall and weighs 129 kilograms.
That weight is the heart of the problem. A 129-kilogram two-legged machine could badly hurt a warehouse worker if it toppled over. That is why almost every factory robot today is bolted down, fenced in, or slow and light enough to be harmless. Most makers of human-shaped robots have simply dodged the question. Agility’s press release, quoted by Spectrum, says Digit 5 deals with people nearby by “autonomously avoiding, stopping or assuming a seated position.” In plain terms: a person walks toward the robot. The robot puts down what it is holding. If it needs to, it lowers itself into a steady sitting position on the floor before the person gets close. It looks clumsy. It slows the work down every time. But it takes the danger away completely.
No more bird legs
Agility’s older robots had legs that bent backwards, like a bird’s. That includes Cassie and every Digit up to version 4. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst explained the reason in a 2019 IEEE Spectrum article. The team studied the physics of how animals walk. They did not copy any one animal. Digit 5 switches to human-style legs. Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman sums up the trade-off. Bird legs move better. Human legs squat and lift better. The job is picking heavy things off the floor and putting them on shelves. So lifting won.
In June 2026, Agility filed a presentation for investors with the SEC, the US financial regulator. The company plans to sell shares to the public. The filing shows how much the new robot improves. Digit version 4 lifts up to 35 pounds. Version 5 lifts up to 50. It can reach 7.2 feet high, up from 5.5 feet. Maximum battery output in a 24-hour period rises from about 16 hours to about 22. The charge ratio improves from 2:1 to 10:1. That means the robot spends far less of the day plugged in. The grips on its arms used to be fixed and built for one task. Now you can swap them. The filing also points to a newly approved safety standard, ISO 25785-1. Agility says it proposed the international working group for moving robots that balance as they go, and that it leads that group. The company claims Digit version 4 was the first human-shaped robot approved by an NRTL, a recognised safety testing lab, on a customer’s real production line. It says version 5 uses the same safety design.
The money figures are rough, and Agility admits it
The investor presentation puts numbers on the cost. At launch, the parts for one Digit 5 are expected to cost roughly $150,000 to $200,000. That is parts only, not the cost of building the robot. At 10,000 robots a year, parts would drop below $50,000. Most customers would not buy the robot outright. Agility models a rental plan at about $8,500 a month. It compares that to a worker costing $30.50 an hour, all costs included, over two 10-hour shifts, 120 hours a week. On those numbers, one robot saves about $100,000 a year. The filing says again and again that these are “purely illustrative” rounded estimates.
The comparison assumes one Digit 5 can simply replace one person. Ackerman does not buy it. He writes that this “is not something that I’m entirely sure has ever happened with any robot, anywhere.”
Orders are in, but no robots are working yet
Agility says it had more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders for Digit 5 as of May 2026. Interest comes from factories, warehouses and delivery firms. A footnote in the filing explains that figure. It covers 1,000 robots on three-year service contracts. The money comes in over time and depends on hitting agreed milestones. Share options vest as robots go into service. That is one-tenth of what Agility says its factory can build in a year. The factory, RoboFab, is in Salem, Oregon, and can make 10,000 robots a year. The company says roughly 75 percent of the parts come from within the United States.
The version working today is number 4. As of May 2026, it was committed to nine customer sites and had run for 65,000 hours. One of those sites is in Cheraw, South Carolina. There, Digit moves 25-pound baskets of bearing parts from a stamping machine into an industrial washing machine. Digit 5 is not in any factory yet. Spectrum did publish photos of real machines. NVIDIA invested in Agility in September 2025 and supplies the computing parts, called IGX Thor and Halos Core. Agility calls Digit 5 the first launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics platform.
Agility plans to go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a shell company set up for such deals (a SPAC). The merger should close within a few months. The aim is to raise more than $620 million, mostly to build more Digit 5 robots. Buyers in Europe and the UK should be able to order in 2027. The filing says: “We believe ‘cooperative safety’ is the critical unlock for scaled humanoid adoption.” That idea gets its real test later. It will be tested when robots that sit down on command share a floor with people who never volunteered to be test subjects.
