Agility's Digit 5 Builds on a Passed OSHA Safety Test

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, the fifth generation of its humanoid warehouse robot, on Sept. 15 and said early-access units will ship to customers in the first half of 2027, with general availability by the end of that year. "Digit 5 is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments," chief executive Peggy Johnson said in the company's announcement.

What ships, and what already shipped

Digit 5 is not the robot with the track record; an earlier Digit is. Agility says that predecessor has logged more than 65,000 hours of operational time and reached a 100,000-tote handling milestone at GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia, warehouse, maintaining 98 percent accuracy on the tasks it performs there. Digit 5 itself has none of that history yet: it weighs 129 kilograms, stands 1.81 meters tall and can reach 2.2 meters, with a payload of 22.7 kilograms, 40 percent more than the outgoing model. Its battery runs 90 minutes between charges and recharges in 9 minutes, a 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio Agility says is five times better than Digit 4's 2-to-1.

Digit 5 spec	Value
Payload	22.7 kg (50 lb), up 40% over Digit 4
Run-to-charge ratio	10:1, versus 2:1 for Digit 4
Battery runtime	90 minutes
Charge time	9 minutes
Reach height	2.2 m (7.2 ft)

How Digit avoids relying on cages

Agility's announcement says Digit 5 continuously monitors nearby people using proprietary AI and multiple sensors, and responds by avoiding a person, stopping or sitting down, a posture in which it physically cannot fall on anyone. Visual and auditory cues signal the robot's next move, and an independent safety controller supervises the response whenever someone crosses into an unsafe distance. "The goal of all of this is to get to collaborative safety," Kevin Reese, Agility's senior director of robotics safety, told Manufacturing Dive. Agility's own announcement says Digit already became the first humanoid to pass an independent field evaluation for industrial safety standards administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, on a working customer production line, a milestone the company frames Digit 5 as building on rather than repeating for itself. The tension between letting a machine decide, second by second, when it is safe to keep moving near a person and needing outside verification of that judgment is the same one that pushed OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to brief the United Nations Security Council in September on AI systems moving faster than governments can oversee them.

A $300 million figure that two accounts describe differently

Agility's announcement cites more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders as of May 2026. A securities filing tied to Agility's pending merger with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp. describes what appears to be the same figure differently: one customer alone has committed to spend $300 million on Digit 5 over multiple years, Manufacturing Dive reported, drawn from a pipeline of more than 30 prospective customers. The merger, still pending, values Agility at $2.5 billion and is expected to close before the end of 2026. Named customers include GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, according to Agility.

Agility says its RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon, a 70,000-square-foot plant, can build up to 10,000 Digit robots a year at full capacity and is projected to employ more than 500 people. A separate Fremont, California, facility opened in July 2026, though Agility's announcement does not specify how the two sites divide manufacturing and testing work. The company is also launching in the European Union and the United Kingdom for the first time, alongside North America, and expects to obtain CE marking, the regulatory approval required to sell industrial equipment in the EU.

Digit 5 also arrives as a launch partner for Nvidia's Halos for Robotics platform, running on Nvidia's IGX Thor computer and Halos Core software, according to Agility's announcement. Agility's materials do not say whether the safety architecture described above runs on that Nvidia stack specifically or on separate compute, which leaves open how much of the cooperatively-safe design depends on one supplier's chips.

What Agility isn't saying yet

Agility did not say what Digit 5 will cost, whether it is sold or leased, or how the $300 million in orders splits across its customer list. It also has not published independent verification of the 98 percent on-task accuracy figure or the 65,000-hour total; both numbers come from Agility itself, measured on tasks and time windows the company chose to disclose rather than an outside auditor's sample. Universal Robots and Fanuc America both introduced new robots at the IMTS 2026 manufacturing trade show, per Manufacturing Dive, though neither company made a direct competitive claim against Digit 5, and Agility's materials do not benchmark the robot against either rival.

Digit 5's safety case depends on its sensors and software staying current for the robot's working life, the same dependency that drew scrutiny elsewhere in September, when CISA listed 14 unresolved flaws in Botslab dashcams with no fix in sight. Agility's announcement does not address how it will patch or support Digit 5's sensors over a multi-year industrial deployment. Early access in the first half of 2027 is the next date that will show whether Digit 5 can start building a deployment record of its own, rather than borrowing its predecessor's.