Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on Monday, the fifth generation of its warehouse humanoid and the first the company says is built to work near people without the fences, light curtains and roped-off cells that industrial robots normally require. The robot lifts 50 pounds, reaches 7.2 feet, runs 90 minutes on a charge that takes nine minutes to replace, and watches its surroundings with what Agility calls proprietary AI algorithms feeding an independent safety controller. What it does not yet have is a certificate from anyone saying the arrangement is safe. Early access begins in the first half of 2027.
The Salem, Oregon, company is making the claim at an awkward moment for scrutiny. Agility is in the middle of a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI that values it at $2.5 billion, and the S-4 filed with the SEC this month shows $1.78 million in net sales for 2025 against an operating loss of $140.2 million — double the prior year. Auditor Grant Thornton attached a going-concern warning. Agility says the cash forecast behind that warning excludes the SPAC proceeds, which the parties estimated in June at more than $620 million gross before redemptions.
The safety architecture is the actual product news. Digit 5 detects people in a 360-degree radius, evaluates proximity as a continuous risk assessment rather than fixed zones, and responds by steering around a worker, slowing, stopping, or squatting into a statically stable seated posture with its motors off. Visual and audio cues signal intent. A separate safety controller, built on NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos for Robotics, triggers the response. The new human-style knees, replacing Digit's backward ostrich legs, exist partly to make that sitting motion possible.
"It is not possible to take an existing robot, add a safety hat on it, and then have it operate safely," Jonathan Hurst, Agility's co-founder and chief robot officer, told The Robot Report. "It is completely holistic. It touches every feature of the robot electrically, mechanically, sensors, computing, everything."
Hurst is candid about where the standards sit. "There's a difference between safety as a personal opinion about how safe you think a robot is, and safety as the industrial standard and regulatory process that you go through to ensure third parties who are unfamiliar with the technology will be safe around these devices," he said. He traced the company's pivot to an early Amazon deployment, when Agility could do the job and then ran into FCC requirements, UL certifications and ISO certifications it had not planned for.
What the standard actually covers
The relevant framework is ISO 10218, revised in 2025 after roughly eight years of work, which folded the old ISO/TS 15066 collaborative-robot specification into the main standard. The revision made functional safety requirements explicit and added robot classifications with matching test methodologies and cybersecurity requirements. It also stopped categorically excluding robots on mobile platforms — which is how a humanoid gets in the door at all.
The catch is what the standard still does not govern. ISO 10218 covers the manipulator; the mobility hazards of a humanoid fall outside it, and the standard assumes statically stable machines. Dynamically stable legged robots — which is exactly what Digit is when it walks — are the subject of a separate standard still in development. So there is no finished, adopted standard against which a walking humanoid's barrier-free operation can be certified today. Agility is not claiming one. It says it expects Digit 5 to carry a CE mark and additional regulatory marks to enable market access in the EU, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which would be the company's first commercial deployment outside North America. Expects, not has.
The hardware numbers are concrete enough. Digit 5 weighs 284 pounds, stands 5-foot-11, and carries 22.7 kilograms repeatedly — enough, Hurst said, to cover single-person lift tasks in OSHA-regulated facilities. The 10:1 run-to-charge ratio, up from Digit 4's 2:1, is what produces the 20-plus-hours-per-day figure. Grippers are swappable on ISO-standard mounting flanges, and Agility has not pretended to solve hands. "One thing we learned is that general-purpose hands don't exist," Hurst said. "There are none on the market. There are none coming soon."
Why it matters
Every humanoid company has a demo video. Very few have a compliance story, and compliance is the thing that decides whether a customer can put the machine on a floor with people on it. Digit 4 logged more than 65,000 hours at GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota's Canadian arm — mostly moving totes, mostly away from workers. Removing the barrier is what turns a humanoid from a cell-bound machine that a conveyor could replace into something with a labor-substitution argument. Agility's S-4 names Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apptronik, Figure AI and 1X as competitors, and none of them has published a certified barrier-free result either.
The demand picture deserves a squint. Agility reports more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May, contingent on milestones. Per the S-4, that entire figure comes from one customer, for 1,000 robots over three years, and the filing separately describes a May agreement for at least 1,000 robots with a "related party" — an accounting term for a counterparty with close ties, such as a major investor. A single unnamed, possibly affiliated buyer is a thin base for a $2.5 billion valuation. The one arm's-length price point on record: Amazon bought five earlier Digits for $1.05 million, or about $210,000 each.
What to watch
Whether the CE mark materializes, and on what basis, given that no adopted standard covers a walking humanoid's mobility hazards. Whether the $300 million order converts into deliveries or evaporates with the milestones. Whether the SPAC closes, and at what redemption rate. And whether any named, arm's-length customer puts Digit 5 on a floor with workers before the end-of-2027 general availability date. RoboFab, Agility's Salem plant, is designed for 10,000 robots a year. It shipped enough in 2025 to book $1.78 million.
“It is not possible to take an existing robot, add a safety hat on it, and then have it operate safely.”— Jonathan Hurst, Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer, Agility Robotics