Agility Robotics’ earlier Digit machines have already spent more than 65,000 hours in North American warehouses and factories, following a full-time GXO deployment in Atlanta in 2024. But those early deployments largely remained behind physical barriers—the very constraint Digit 5 is meant to erase.¹

Unveiled Tuesday, Digit 5 uses onboard, vision-based sensing and AI to react as people enter its path. At a distance, it can slow, move aside or stop; if someone continues closing in, it can squat to the floor and shut down its motors. Chief technology officer Pras Velagapudi called it a “complex safe motion system” designed to choose among mitigations depending on the detected human presence.²

That is more than a technical flourish. Agility argues that shared-floor safety could let robots move through active aisles, pause while workers change pallets, and take on jobs where a safety cage simply is not practical. Jonathan Hurst, the company’s cofounder and chief robot officer, has described safety as an industry-wide “blocker.”² Agility is also helping develop the proposed ISO 25785-1 standard for industrial mobile robots, while integrating Nvidia safety software into Digit 5’s computing stack.²

The redesign is aimed at productivity as well as caution. Digit 5 replaces its predecessor’s backward-bending knees with a more human-like configuration, lifts up to 50 pounds—about 40% more than the prior model—and can recharge in about nine minutes after roughly 90 minutes of work. “We don’t need to run a marathon with this robot,” Hurst said. “We need to lift heavy things.”¹

Agility expects early access in North America in the first half of 2027 and general availability by year-end, before expanding to Europe and the UK. The commercial test is stark: the company says it has more than $300 million in multiyear Digit 5 orders, but reported $1.8 million in 2025 net sales and a $140 million operating loss. Its illustrative five-year customer cost—roughly $400,000 per robot—shows how much Digit must prove before safety becomes a business breakthrough.¹