Agility's 20-Hour Digit 5 Claim Rests on 90 Minutes of Runtime and a Nine-Minute Charge

Agility Robotics said on October 15 that Nyobolt, a battery company in Cambridge, England, will supply the pack for its Digit 5 humanoid, which runs about 90 minutes per charge and recharges in nine, a 10-to-1 ratio against 2-to-1 for Digit 4.

Agility says that ratio supports more than 20 productive hours in a 24-hour day. The Robot Report and Agility's own release, as republished on StockTitan, carry the same figures. Both are company claims. Neither source reports independent testing.

The arithmetic behind 20 hours

The number that matters here is not 20 hours but the count of docking events. A cycle of 90 minutes working plus nine minutes charging is 99 minutes. A 1,440-minute day holds about 14.5 of them, which is 1,309 minutes, or 21.8 hours, of work and 2.2 hours of charging. Silicon Canals arrives at the same 21.8 and calls it an idealized figure with no downtime, faults or maintenance.

So the claim needs the robot to walk to a dock about 14 times a day, each time with a job to hand off. Daniel Diez, Agility's chief business officer, put the business case this way, according to The Robot Report: "For our customers, Digit's uptime is the business case." A paraphrase in eWeek adds the condition: long days only count if the humanoid has enough work to do.

1. Digit 42 :1
2. Digit 5 with Nyobolt10 :1

Source: Agility Robotics figures via The Robot Report, accessed 2026-10-16

What is not disclosed

Nyobolt, founded in 2019, describes proprietary anode materials, cell design and power electronics. The Robot Report says the announcement gives no cell chemistry, no capacity, no charge rate and no cycle life. Without cycle life, 14 fast charges a day is a wear figure nobody can check: at that rate a pack sees more than 5,000 charges a year.

The filing language is blunter than the press language. The StockTitan text says Digit 5 may not meet its specifications in commercial use and lists reliance on Nyobolt as exclusive battery supplier as a risk. Agility plans to list via a business combination with Churchill Capital Corp XI, expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with a proposed Nasdaq ticker of AGLT.

Digit 5 figure	Value	Source
Runtime per charge	About 90 minutes	Agility
Charge time	About 9 minutes	Agility
Payload	Up to 50 lb	Silicon Canals
Weight	284 lb	Silicon Canals
Orders	$300 million, multi-year, subject to milestones	Silicon Canals

Dates and the Atlas comparison

Agility expects early customer access in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027, with broader availability six to nine months after early access per The Robot Report. eWeek reports early v5 units reaching customers in December 2026. The two dates conflict, and the later one matches the company's own release.

The photo above shows Boston Dynamics' Atlas, which Silicon Canals lists at about four hours on a hot-swappable battery. Agility has no photograph on Wikimedia Commons that we could use. Silicon Canals also reports Amazon completing a $1.05 million purchase of five Digit units, which works out to $210,000 a unit; that is a single-source figure and includes whatever else was in the purchase.

The variable that would falsify the 20-hour claim is cycle life: a customer-run log of how many fast charges the pack survives, which will not exist before early access opens in 2027. Until then it sits with the other unverified autonomy claims the site has tracked, such as the Tesla remote-operator crash record and Rivian's early-access autonomy programme.