Agility Explores Wheels While Digit 5 Waits Until 2027

Agility Robotics will not deliver Digit 5 to early-access customers until the first half of 2027, and its co-founder Jonathan Hurst confirmed on Sept. 25 that the company is also studying wheeled robots. The order book is large; the robots that fill it are between three and 15 months away.

What Agility said about wheels on Sept. 25

A wheeled humanoid rendering appeared near the end of the launch video for Digit 5, which Agility unveiled on Sept. 15. The Robot Report asked about it, and Hurst, a co-founder and Chief Robot Officer, said: "We're exploring a range of robot designs and form factors, including wheels, to address different operating environments and customer needs."

Asked for a timeline or a form factor, Hurst answered "Too early to say!...really we're just starting." Humanoid.guide reported that Agility has not said whether the design would become a wheeled Digit or a separate platform, and that the rendering is design exploration rather than a product.

The engineering case is ordinary. Wheels use less energy and need simpler mechanics on flat floors; legs earn their cost on stairs and uneven ground. A warehouse aisle is mostly the first kind of floor, which is the uncomfortable fact for any legged robot sold into logistics, and a useful contrast with Feather Robotics' $29,990 modular humanoid, which was priced before any comparable order book existed.

What Digit 5 is, by the numbers Agility supplies

Every figure below comes from Agility's own launch release and is vendor-supplied. Agility said Digit 5 passed an independent OSHA field evaluation; that is the company's claim, and this piece did not see the evaluation itself.

Spec	Digit 5 (vendor-supplied)
Payload	50 lb (22.7 kg), up 40% from Digit 4
Runtime and charge	90 minutes running, 9 minutes charging
Height and weight	5 ft 11 in (1.81 m), 284 lb (129 kg)
Availability	Early access first half of 2027; general availability end of 2027

The number that matters here is the 10:1 run-to-charge ratio, not the payload. Agility uses it to claim more than 20 productive hours in a 24-hour day, and the arithmetic holds: a 99-minute cycle fits about 14.5 times into 24 hours, which is roughly 21.8 hours of work if no robot ever waits for a charger. That assumes one dock per robot; a 10-robot site with five docks would not get there.

The denominator: 65,000 hours and $1.8 million

Agility's June 24 merger announcement with Churchill Capital Corp XI values it at $2.5 billion before the deal's money and expects more than $620 million in gross proceeds. That includes $420 million from Churchill's trust account and a private placement of about $200 million at $10 a share, which Agility said Foxconn led.

The same announcement says Digit deployments at Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre have logged more than 65,000 operating hours across nine facilities. A year holds 8,760 hours, so 65,000 hours is about 7.4 robot-years of continuous running spread over nine sites. That is a real deployment history. It is also small next to the 10,000 units a year that Agility says its RoboFab plant in Salem, Oregon, is designed to build.

1. 2025 revenue1.8 $ million
2. 2025 operating loss140 $ million
3. Multi-year Digit v5 orders300 $ million

Source: Agility Robotics merger announcement (June 24, 2026); The Robot Report (Sept. 25, 2026)

According to The Robot Report, 2025 revenue was $1.8 million against a $140 million operating loss. The contracted orders, at more than $300 million, exceed that revenue by a factor of about 167. Neither Agility's announcement nor the launch release says over how many years the orders are delivered or how much of them can be cancelled.

Peggy Johnson, Agility's chief executive, said in the launch release that Digit 5 "is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments." The barrier is the safety cage. Agility calls Digit 5 cooperatively safe, meaning it detects nearby workers and slows, stops or moves away, and it says it has contributed to ANSI/A3 TR R15.108 and ISO 25785-1, the first international humanoid safety standard. Contributing to a standard is not certification under it.

Why a wheeled study matters to that order book

If a warehouse buyer needs a robot that lifts 50 lb totes on a flat floor, a wheeled base would cut cost, weight and battery draw, and would raise runtime beyond 90 minutes. That is the opening a wheeled design offers Agility's own customers. It is also an admission that legs cost something on the jobs Digit 5 is sold for; Hurst told The Robot Report he expects legged robots to become "the right solution for an increasingly broad range of applications" as safety, reliability and capability advance, and the sentence is careful about tense.

What would change my read is a price. Agility has published none for Digit 5, and without one the $300 million cannot be converted into a unit count. The next hard date is the first-half-2027 early-access window; the merger, which Agility said it expects to close in 2026, needs shareholder and regulatory approval first. For a different kind of deployment count, see Volvo's autonomous trucks passing 3 million tonnes hauled.