Agility Robotics Rebuilt Humanoid Robot Digit From Scratch for Commercial Deployment

Agility Robotics has launched Digit 5, designed to be the first humanoid robot that can safely and economically do useful work at scale, marking a fundamental shift in how the company approaches humanoid robotics. Rather than iterating incrementally on its existing Digit platform, Agility rebuilt the robot entirely based on a decade of commercial deployment experience and hard lessons learned about what customers actually need.

Founded in 2015 by Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones from Oregon State University's robotics lab, Agility Robotics initially focused on solving a pure physics problem: building bipedal robots that could walk and run with the natural, spring-like motion observed in animals. The company's first project, ATRIAS, demonstrated this principle—a robot that successfully reproduced animal gaits through spring-mass models. That initial success established Agility's technical credibility but also revealed a hard truth about the path to commercialization.

Agility's first commercial product was Cassie, a bipedal research robot with ostrich-like legs designed to maintain balance through active, fluid motion rather than rigid steps. The company sold 10 Cassie units to universities including Harvard, Caltech, the University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley, ultimately saturating the $250,000 research robot market. While Cassie proved the company could build and sell robots, it was not commercially viable as a product for real-world work.

To make the robots useful for actual customers, Agility added a torso and arms to the Cassie platform, creating Digit 1, the company's first mobile manipulation robot. This was a critical step toward creating a machine that could perform practical tasks, not just demonstrate physics principles. However, the company faced a recurring question from potential customers: why build a humanoid robot with legs at all, when simpler single-purpose automation might suffice?

Agility found its answer in warehouse and manufacturing facilities where bin handling became the ideal initial application. The task required two arms to lift large bins onto high shelves and legs to balance and navigate narrow spaces. Bin handling was constrained enough to give Digit an economically viable first job while remaining variable enough that it couldn't be addressed by narrow single-purpose automation.

The commercial deployments taught Agility critical lessons about the gap between robotics research and products customers will purchase. In 2019, Digit 1 demonstrated capabilities with Ford Motor Company, carrying packages from autonomous vehicles to front porches. Agility then developed Digit 2 and 3 while working with a global package delivery company on moving and sorting cardboard boxes. Amazon tested Digit 4 on moving and stacking bins, and it became the world's first commercially deployed humanoid at logistics provider GXO. Despite this apparent success, the company faced mounting pressure to prioritize functionality over the engineering ideals that had driven the company's founding.

Founder Jonathan Hurst initially dreamed of building robots that combined locomotion and manipulation to move through the world with graceful, elegant motion—robots that achieved "a mastery of motion, achieved through devices designed to navigate the constraints of physics with elegance." However, deploying Digit robots exposed a hard business reality: customers cared only that robots moved bins, not how they moved. When bins weren't moving, customers were losing money, and Agility had to make continuous improvements to keep deployments operational.

The pressure to transform Digit into a real commercial product intensified when Agility recruited a new executive team with commercialization experience. They insisted that Digit was missing key features essential for a real product. This led to painful compromises between engineering ideals and market realities. Digit 4 EVT (Engineering Validation and Test) was originally intended as a minor upgrade but instead incorporated major changes including larger batteries, system-wide safety and regulatory compliance upgrades, and added mass that dramatically altered the robot's appearance and capabilities. Agility added a head to Digit 4 to optimize antenna and camera placement, which also proved surprisingly useful for human-robot interaction.

For Hurst, watching Digit transform from his vision of a graceful, elegant machine into a bulky, functional workhorse was difficult. He acknowledged that Digit 4 EVT took steps backward from his vision of how humanoids should look and move, as aesthetics and elegance of movement were repeatedly sacrificed in favor of brutal functionality. The design process became "a ruthless triage, with aesthetics and elegance of movement being delayed over and over again in favor of brutal functionality".

Yet commercial deployments provided invaluable learning that would guide the complete redesign. Through Digit 4 EVT's deployments, Agility identified the first 10 use cases Digit would perform and then began designing Digit 5 from scratch based on everything the company had learned.

Digit 5 represents Agility's first real step toward a general-purpose robot and marks the company's transition from imagining what a future humanoid robot should be to designing a product around the realities of customer deployments. The new robot is engineered to lift 23-kilogram bins onto high shelves with a battery that can run for 90 minutes on a 9-minute charge.

The redesign prioritizes regulatory and safety requirements that Hurst initially viewed as tangential to his original vision but that proved to be absolute requirements for scaling commercial deployment. Digit 5 must meet European CE regulatory compliance, North American UL electrical-safety certifications, and Federal Communications Commission limits for electromagnetic radiation. Safety emerged as one of the most critical barriers to scaling, and Digit 5 is designed to operate safely next to human coworkers while working 20 hours a day and lifting more than a human can.

Agility's RoboFab facility in Salem, Oregon—a 70,000-square-foot facility—has the capacity to produce more than 10,000 Digit 5 robots per year, indicating the company's commitment to scaling beyond research deployments and early commercial pilots.

Agility's approach to Digit 5's development illustrates a critical tension in commercializing advanced robotics: the engineering drive to solve problems elegantly and the market imperative to solve problems profitably. The company's willingness to abandon years of research into graceful bipedal locomotion in favor of a heavier, bulkier design reflects the practical constraints of scaling humanoid robots from research curiosities to commercial workhorses. Whether this compromise enables Digit 5 to achieve the scale deployments that justify the complete redesign remains to be demonstrated in real-world warehouse and logistics operations.