Agility Robotics’ coming Digit v5 humanoid robot will work safely and cooperatively side-by-side with humans, Agility’s chief business officer Daniel Diez told me recently: no safety fencing required. It’ll also be able to work 20 hours a day and change hands – AKA end effectors – and eventually do that on its own.
The biggest challenges blocking humanoid robots from entering the workforce aren’t speed, agility, battery capacity, or dexterity, Diez says. It’s being a cobot: being able to work right in the mix of the warehouse or factory: no more being caged off for safety reasons.
“It’s probably the biggest misconception that what’s holding back these robots are skills or AI or batteries,” Diez told me recently on the Humanoid Daily podcast. “The truth of the matter is what holds back large-scale deployments of humanoid robots is their inability to work outside of safety parameters or safety cages.”
That is precisely the problem Agility says it is about to solve.
In December, the company plans to begin deploying Digit V5 to early customers. Digit v5 will be what Diez calls “the world’s first cooperatively safe robot, a robot capable of working in close proximity with people and ensuring their safety at the same time.” Few if any humanoid robots are currently working right beside humans. Figure, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics and Tesla have humanoids working in somewhat shared settings, reportedly, but not yet completely mixing in with human workers.
Digit v5 will be a significant upgrade in at least three ways:
- Cooperative safety: working safely with humans thanks to a massively upgraded software and hardware combination including a new algorithm to detect people using cameras and sensors, the ability to understand what it’s seeing and the physical capability to react in a way that keeps humans safe. That last part leans on hardware V4 already had. Digit’s proprietary cycloidal actuators in its hips and knees give it the strength and dynamic stability to react without dropping a payload or falling over. Agility has tested this by literally pulling the rug out from under Digit. It takes a quick half-step, catches itself, and keeps the payload in the air. “Second to safety is that dynamic stability, which, by the way, is a core part of safety,” Diez said.
- 20-hour working days: better battery life and quick charging will enable Digit v5 to put in 20-hour days. Customers want one robot that can cover a three-shift operation, Diez says. “Now the unit economics get really interesting when you really only deploy one robot across three shifts of operation.”
- Flexible manipulation: Digit v5 will have an ISO flange — a standardized connector at the end of its arms — so that Digit can use the enormous existing catalog of end effectors built up over decades of robotics. Eventually, it will swap them itself, which Agility has already demoed. The idea is that Digit gets tasked, realizes it needs a different hand, walks over, changes tools, and gets on with the job. That also adds more delicate work like kitting and sorting to what Digit is already doing in bulk material handling.
The biggest deal here is Digit working with humans. Right now, pretty much every humanoid robot working in a warehouse or factory — Digit included — operates cordoned off behind safety fencing, physically separated from the humans around it. That’s essentially a deployment tax eating floor space, disrupting workflows and just completely kiboshing deals: many facilities simply don’t have the room.
“Opening up the safety cages, basically removing them, allows people to be able to walk by certain areas and the robots to be integrated more holistically into a working factory or a working warehouse,” Diez says. He expects it to open up not just new use cases but entire verticals, including retail and pharmaceutical, where a fenced-off robot is a non-starter. “This will open up the ability to work with a great number of customers who we’ve had to say, wait for the next-generation robot.”
Digit’s sweet spot, for now, is deliberately narrow.
Agility chose bulk material handling — moving things around factories and warehouses — as its beachhead because that’s where the labor gap is most acute across the US, Europe, Korea and Japan.
“Dull, dirty, dangerous jobs, injury-prone, high degree of absenteeism, high degree of turnover,” Diez says. “These jobs are where Digit excels.”
I asked Diez about speed – we’ve all seen humanoid robots walk, and frankly some of them can’t outpace our grandparents. In response, Diez brought up Schaeffler’s plant in South Carolina, where Digit is working right now, loading greasy machine parts into an industrial washer. Today, Digit v4 already outpaces the washer’s ability to ingest parts. So speed, he says, isn’t always about being faster than a human.
“It isn’t always necessary to be faster than a human,” he says. “It’s ‘can I process more work in the same time period than the alternative?’”
And cost matters too: can you do that at a price below the fully burdened cost of a human doing the same job … “if they could even find that person,” Diez adds.
Of course, all of this arrives as Agility steps into an unusually bright spotlight. The company is going public via a $2.5 billion merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI under the ticker AGLT. That will make it the first US pure-play humanoid robotics company to report real financials as a public company. The good news for the company: Agility says it’s sitting on roughly $300 million in booked revenue across some 1,000 robots and nine customer sites including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota and Mercado Libre.
Diez frames the going-public transition as a chance to set a bar in a field awash with nine- and ten-figure valuations built largely on demo reels.
“You don’t see us pumping out marketing videos,” he said. “This is what a humanoid robotics company looks like that is beginning to deploy commercially … and is focused on delivering ROI.”
Even more interesting will be the public launch of Digit v5. Then we’ll see if the next version of Agility’s humanoid robot can support – and grow – that $300 million. And if our next-gen humanoids can mix right in with humans.