Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, its first humanoid robot engineered to operate safely alongside human workers without physical cages or separation barriers. The new model can detect people at a distance, alter its path, stand still, or even squat into a seated position when a person moves into close proximity. Early access begins in the first half of 2027, with general availability by the end of that year.
The safety architecture is the point. Agility's earlier Digit robots have logged more than 65,000 hours across warehouses and factories in North America, deployed by GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. But every one of those deployments has required workarounds — isolated work cells, physical barriers, or shutdown-on-approach behavior — because letting a humanoid share floor space with people was a liability nobody wanted to underwrite.
The safety issue has been what Agility cofounder Jonathan Hurst previously called a blocker for everybody in the industry. Digit 5 is Agility's answer: an AI-driven perception stack with multiple vision-based sensor types feeding a safe-motion system that chooses among graduated responses rather than defaulting to a full stop.
“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, Agility Robotics
Key facts
- 01Digit 5 can lift 50-pound loads, covering all single-person lift tasks defined by OSHA workplace safety regulations.
- 02The robot runs 90 minutes on a charge and recharges in 9 minutes, enabling 20+ hours of work per 24-hour period.
- 03Earlier Digit versions have logged 65,000+ hours at GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
- 04Digit 5 uses Nvidia's Thor IGX compute and Halos for Robotics software stack for its safety system.
- 05Early access arrives in the first half of 2027, with general availability by end of 2027 from the Salem, Oregon RoboFab facility.
Under the hood, Digit 5 runs on Nvidia's Thor IGX compute platform paired with the Nvidia Halos for Robotics software stack, which provides safety primitives for robotic applications. Agility says it is one of the first companies to push Thor IGX through to a functionally safe deployment, and the platform sits at the core of the safety case the company is building with regulators and customers.
That safety case is also going international. Agility has been participating in an ISO working group developing ISO 25785-1, a new standard for industrial mobile robots. The standard is currently in committee review and will eventually go to a vote by the 89 voting nation members of the International Organization for Standardization — a process that, when complete, gives buyers a common yardstick for evaluating humanoid safety claims.
The physical spec sheet moved too. Digit 5 stands 5 feet 11 inches tall with a 7.2-foot reach, up from Digit 4's 5.5-foot reach, letting it access the same shelves an average adult can. It handles 50-pound loads repeatedly, covering the full range of single-person lift tasks defined by OSHA. A swappable end-effector design lets operators install different grippers for different tasks without swapping the whole robot.
The utilization math is what will get finance teams' attention. Digit 5's battery lasts 90 minutes on a charge and recharges in 9 minutes, giving it more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour window. That is a duty cycle that starts to look like a two-shift human worker rather than an intermittent tool, and it materially shifts the payback period on a per-unit basis.
Agility is retooling its RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon, to produce Digit 5 at scale. The company was the first to deploy humanoid robots in full-time commercial operations, at a GXO warehouse in Atlanta in 2024, and the competitive pressure has only grown since — US and Chinese firms are racing to put humanoids into paying work, with Unitree's Wang Xingxing recently pushing Chinese unit costs down to $4,900, which we covered earlier this month.
The near-human safety features open specific workflows that were previously off-limits. Digit 5 can stack and package goods onto pallets and pause while a worker swaps the pallet out, or move through aisles where people are also working — scenarios where, as CTO Pras Velagapudi put it, it's not really practical to constrain the robot within a physical safety cage.
The caveats are real. Digit 5 is being pitched as cooperative safety, meaning shared workspace at a safe distance, not yet collaborative safety, where humans and humanoids work hand-in-hand on the same task. The ISO 25785-1 standard is not yet ratified. Sensor coverage details are undisclosed, and the industry has no long-tail incident data on humanoids operating without barriers at scale — the 65,000 hours logged to date were largely in cell-isolated or restricted-access configurations. Whether Thor IGX and Agility's safe-motion stack hold up in messier real-world floor conditions is what the 2027 pilots will actually test.
For the humanoid market, Digit 5 is the first serious attempt to move the category from science-project deployments to line-integrated labor. The winners in this race will not be the companies with the flashiest gait or the most viral demo videos — they will be the ones whose safety cases hold up in front of OSHA inspectors, insurance underwriters, and plant managers who have to sign off on letting a 5-foot-11 machine walk past their staff. Agility has spent years building toward that conversation, and Digit 5 is the first product that can plausibly carry it.
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