Agility Robotics has pulled the curtain back on its most capable machine yet. The Salem, Oregon-based company unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, calling it the next generation of its general-purpose humanoid robot and its first humanoid engineered for cooperatively safe work at scale — meaning it can operate near people without the physical safety cages traditional automation requires.
Built From Three Years of Real-World Feedback
Digit 5 stands 5-foot-11 and weighs 284 pounds, designed to move materials alongside human workers in warehouses and manufacturing plants. Agility built it on lessons drawn from three years of customer deployments with its predecessor, Digit 4, after clients asked for a bigger payload, longer operating hours, and the ability to run the robot without separating it from workers behind barriers. The company says the design is backed by more than 65,000 hours of real-world operating data.
CEO Peggy Johnson, a former Microsoft and Magic Leap executive, framed it as a direct response to what customers asked for after years of production-floor use.
10:1 run-to-charge ratio — A 90-minute runtime battery that recharges in just 9 minutes, up from Digit 4’s 2:1 ratio, enabling more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour day, provided the robot can regularly return to its charging dock.
The charging port sits in the robot’s rear section, alongside a safety display, an emergency stop button, and a camera.
A Redesigned Body for Heavier Lifting
One of the most visible changes is the disappearance of the backward-bending, bird-like legs that defined earlier Digit models. Digit 5’s legs now bend in a more human-like direction, letting it crouch, gather cargo, and kneel without its ankles hitting the floor. The new leg design is powered by proprietary cycloidal actuator technology and was engineered specifically to withstand repetitive lifting.
| Spec | Digit 5 |
|---|---|
| Repeated lift capacity | 50 lb (up 40% over Digit 4) |
| Maximum reach height | 7.2 ft (up from 5.5 ft) |
| Full recharge time | 9 minutes |
| Battery runtime | 90 minutes |
| Daily productive uptime | 20+ hours in a 24-hour day |
| Height / Weight | 5 ft 11 in / 284 lb |
Knee pads support the robot while kneeling, and it can drop into a seated position and power down its motors so workers can approach it more safely. Its grippers use ISO-standard mounting flanges, so tools can be swapped for different tasks.
Safety Systems Built to Work Without Cages
Digit 5 relies on AI and multiple onboard sensors to track nearby people, and depending on the situation it will steer around them, stop, or sit down. Visual and audio cues signal what the robot is about to do next, and a separate, independent safety controller triggers those responses whenever someone gets too close. The safety architecture is built on NVIDIA’s IGX Thor platform combined with the Halos for Robotics safety system.
Agility isn’t just building to its own standards, either. The company is a project leader and active contributor to ANSI/A3’s TR R15.108, a technical report under development for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots — including humanoids — in the US and Canada, and it’s also contributing to ISO 25785-1, which will be the first international safety standard specifically for the humanoid category.
What It’s Meant to Do on the Job
Agility is pairing Digit 5’s physical capabilities with its Agility Arc cloud platform so the robot can handle end-to-end operational tasks rather than a single repetitive motion. That includes unloading goods or materials from a loaded pallet, machine tending, managing kitting and sequencing, running quality inspections, and handing materials off to existing autonomous mobile robots or conveyor belts.
The Business Case
In regulatory filings, Agility has floated illustrative estimates of offering Digit 5 to customers as a service at roughly $8,500 per month. Based on 20 hours of daily work and an assumed fully loaded human labor cost of $30.50 an hour, the company estimates a Digit 5 could save an employer around $100,000 per year per robot. Agility reported more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders as of May 2026.
“Digit 5 is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments. We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors.”
— Peggy Johnson, CEO, Agility Robotics
The launch also comes at a pivotal corporate moment: Agility Robotics is in the process of going public through a $2.5 billion SPAC merger. Amazon, an early investor in the company, has already run multiple pilots of earlier Digit models, including one observed at a warehouse south of Seattle back in 2023.