Agility Unveils Digit 5, a Safety-Conscious Humanoid

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a new version of its humanoid robot designed to safely work alongside people in industrial environments at scale.

The U.S. robotics maker said it developed its latest model following three years of commercial deployments of its predecessor, Digit 4, which accumulated more than 65,000 hours of operational time across customer sites.

The new model, released on Tuesday, can repeatedly lift loads of up to 50 pounds It's fitted with a swappable gripper system designed to let different end-effectors be used for various tasks, including tote handling and machine tending.

The launch comes as humanoids increasingly move from labs to real-world deployments, with developers paying more attention to human-robot interactions and safety standards as a result.

Agility, which said safety remains "one of the biggest obstacles to scaling humanoid robots" commercially, designed Digit 5 to address these concerns. The new model has a range of systems to detect people, communicate motion intent and adapt behavior to potential dangers.

"Safety is a real bottleneck, and Digit 5 is the clearest industrial attempt to address this challenge," said Lian Jye Su, analyst at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget. "Digit 5 will likely be deployed in well-defined commercial and industrial use cases with clear safety and security parameters before it rolls out to more consumer or home use cases."

Yet, while designs such as Agility's show increased integration of safety into robotic design from the ground up, Su said the industry still relies heavily on individual vendors' safety frameworks. Total trust in humanoids will require industrywide standardization.

Humanoid safety presents new challenges

The company said Digit's safety architecture, including its human-detection systems and motion intent communication, is intended to reduce the need for protective physical barriers and enable robots to operate in closer proximity to human workers.