Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15 from Salem, Oregon, and the headline specification is not the payload or the charging time. It is the absence of a fence. The new generation of Agility's general-purpose humanoid robot is the company's first engineered for what it calls cooperatively safe work at scale — designed to operate in close proximity to human workers without the physical safety barriers that conventional industrial automation still requires. The company says more than $300 million in multi-year orders are already booked against the platform.
What Changed From Digit 4
CEO Peggy Johnson framed the machine as a direct response to customer feedback: it was built, she said, to the exact requirements customers gave the company after three years of Digit 4 running on their production floors. The specification sheet reflects that.
- Payload: A redesigned leg engineered for repetitive lifting, driven by proprietary cycloidal actuators, delivers 40% more payload — up to 50 lb (22.7 kg) repeatedly. Agility positions that threshold deliberately: it covers all single-person lift tasks in OSHA-regulated facilities.
- Reach: Digit 5 stands 5'11" and can reach objects above seven feet, a 7.2-foot reach versus roughly 5.5 feet on the previous generation.
- Charging: A 90-minute battery fast-charges in nine minutes, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio against Digit 4's 2:1, underpinning Agility's claim of more than 20 hours of productive work per 24-hour day.
- End-effectors: Swappable tooling on ISO-standard mounts, broadening the platform beyond the tote-handling work that has dominated Digit 4 deployments.
One trade-off deserves flagging, because the marketing framing obscures it: per-charge runtime went down, not up. Digit 4 ran roughly four hours between charges; Digit 5 runs 90 minutes and compensates by charging almost ten times faster. Total daily availability improves. Individual shift length shortens. For facilities that cannot easily route a robot to a charger mid-task, that is a real planning constraint.
The machine also got heavier — 284 pounds, thanks to redundant sensing, an independent safety controller and the heavy-lift legs. Payload as a fraction of its own mass actually fell, to about 18% from roughly 22–25% on Digit 4.
The Safety Architecture Is the Product
Agility built Digit 5's safety case on three pillars. Human detection uses multiple sensors and AI software to continuously monitor for nearby people, allowing the robot to avoid them, halt, or drop into a seated position. Safety cues give visual and audible signals communicating the robot's intent. And independent motion control runs a separate safety controller that monitors distance from people — architecturally distinct from the main autonomy stack, which is the design pattern functional-safety auditors look for.
That architecture was developed on NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos for Robotics, with Agility named as the first launch partner for the Halos platform.
Agility is also helping write the rules it will be judged against. The company is a project leader and contributor to ANSI/A3 TR R15.108 for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots including humanoids, and to ISO 25785-1, the first international safety standard aimed specifically at the humanoid category. Both are still in progress. That is the crux of the sceptical case: Digit 5 carries a $300 million order book into a safety standard that is not finished. A fixed robotic arm can be braked on power loss; a walking robot that loses active balance control falls, and Digit 5 weighs 284 pounds before it picks anything up.
Why It Matters
Removing the cage is the single largest unlock in the humanoid business case. Caged automation requires a facility to be redesigned around the machine; a robot certified to work beside people can be inserted into an existing line. That distinction is the difference between a capital project and a staffing decision, and it is why the safety architecture — not the actuators — is the commercially significant part of this launch.
The commercial terms make the pitch concrete. Agility has floated illustrative pricing of about $8,500 per month under a robots-as-a-service arrangement, or roughly $200,000 for an outright purchase. Against a fully loaded warehouse labour cost across multiple shifts, the monthly figure is at least in the conversation — which was not true of humanoids two years ago.
Timing tempers the enthusiasm. Early access arrives in the first half of 2027, with general availability targeted by the end of that year, including the company's first UK and EU deployments. Everything announced on September 15 describes a product that has not shipped. Agility's credibility rests on the prior generation: more than 65,000 hours of commercial operating experience from Digit 4 across North American sites including GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
The Financing Backdrop
Digit 5 arrives as Agility prepares to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a roughly $2.5 billion valuation, with the combined company expected to trade under the ticker AGLT and the transaction slated to close in 2026. That context matters when reading the order book. Filings note the $300 million figure is not a measure of current-period revenue, depends on milestone achievement, and derives substantially from a three-year contract for 1,000 robots with an undisclosed customer. It is a genuine commitment, not recognised revenue.
The wider market backdrop is an arms race that Chinese manufacturers currently dominate on volume. Global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026 rose sharply year over year, with Chinese makers holding the overwhelming majority of units and industrial or commercial applications now accounting for most of that volume. Agility's bet is that Western buyers will pay a premium for a machine that comes with a safety file, a standards seat and an OSHA-shaped payload spec — and that the fence, not the robot, was always the real obstacle.
