Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, works for 90 minutes and charges in 9. The news is elsewhere, though: a robot that, per the company, detects the people around it and decides on its own to go around them, stop or sit down, so it can work without fences.
- Per Agility, safety is a new architecture: human detection, signals of intent and an independent controller that oversees the response.
- The battery gives 90 minutes of work and charges in 9 minutes, which means more than 20 hours of work in a day.
- The orders of over $300 million are the company's own figure and depend on contractual milestones.
Until now the industrial robot lived behind a fence. Agility itself says so: traditional automation requires physical safety barriers.
The humanoid is the promise that the fence comes down and the machine works next to people. Only the promise trips exactly on the fence. Nobody lets 129 kilograms of metal move freely next to a worker without proof that it will stop in time.
Why sitting down is a clever move
A stopped robot on two legs is still a tall, heavy machine that can tip. A seated one is low, stable and clear to everyone nearby: this thing is doing nothing right now.
The number that will decide whether this works is not in the announcement. It is the count of hours next to people without an incident in the first deployments, and we will only see it after the launch in 2027.
A note on the orders. The three hundred million are quoted in a press release that also carries legal language about a proposed merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a blank check company. The figure is theirs and conditional, so I write it as a claim and not as revenue.
If the EU really is the next market, the CE mark will be the first real exam. There, safety is proven on paper before it is shown on the floor.