The single biggest thing standing between humanoid robots and real jobs isn’t intelligence, or better hands, or better battery life. It’s a fence.

Today, almost all humanoid robots with actual working gigs work in isolation, separated from us fragile meatbag humans with a safety fence. But not for long: Agility Robotics is launching its next-generation humanoid robot, Digit 5, and one of the key features is safe cooperative work in the presence of humans: no more cages.

“Digit 5 is removing a major barrier to scaling humanoid robots in industrial environments,” says Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics. “We built it to the exact requirements our customers gave us after three years of Digit 4 working on their production floors, and the market has responded with more than $300 million in multi-year orders and a growing pipeline of customers across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics.”

Digit 5 is a beast of a humanoid robot, so allowing it to work with humans says something about Agility Robotics’ confidence in its AI and safety technology. Digit 5 stands 5’ 11" tall – big for a robot – and weighs in at a hefty 284 pounds. That beef comes with payoff though: it can reach objects higher than seven feet in the air and carry up to 50 pounds, 40% more than its predecessor, Digit 4.

It has a new leg design engineered for repetitive lifting, proprietary cycloidal actuators, and swappable end effectors – robot-ese for hands. Digit 5’s battery last only 90 minutes, but it recharges in a quick 9 minutes, so Johnson told me this is a robot that can put in a solid 20 hours of work a day, with just four hours of downtime to for coffee breaks. (OK, electricity charging breaks, which it accomplishes autonomously.)

But the biggest deal for Digit 5 is its cobot capability: the ability to work cooperatively with humans in the same space thanks to what Agility says is safe human detection via proprietary AI algorithms plus multiple sensor technologies.

How to build a robot that doesn’t need a cage

Agility’s answer to robots that can work safely with humans has three layers.

  1. Safe human detection: This is proprietary AI algorithms plus multiple sensor technologies that are continuously monitoring for people. If people are detected, the robot autonomously avoids, stops, or — and this is the interesting one — assumes a squatting position.
  2. Safety cues: These are visual and auditory signals that telegraph motion intent, so the human in the aisle knows which way the robot is about to go.
  3. Safe motion control: This is an independent safety controller that oversees responses when a person is detected inside an unsafe distance.

That third layer is where Nvidia comes in. Agility is the first launch partner for Nvidia’s Halos for Robotics platform, announced in June, pairing Digit with Nvidia IGX Thor and Halos Core. Agility will also run Digit 5 through Nvidia’s Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, an ANSI/ANAB-accredited program meant to shorten the path to third-party certification.

“Safely operating around people and assets is what moves humanoid robots from pilots to industrial deployments at scale,” said Deepu Talla, vice president of robotics and edge AI at Nvidia.

Agility is also working the standards side, as a project leader on ANSI/A3 TR R15.108 for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots, and contributing to ISO 25785-1, positioned as the first international safety standard for humanoids. Of course, this is still a committee draft, not a published standard, and it’s possible that Digit 5 will reach customers before the rulebook governing its behavior is complete.

The order book: $300 million

Digit has the longest tenure of any humanoid actually working in industrial facilities.

It was the first humanoid robot to get a paying job , as I reported way back in November of 2024. So Digit has had close to three years of continuous commercial deployment including more than 65,000 operational hours across GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. At GXO’s Flowery Branch facility near Atlanta, Digit 4 hit a cumulative 100,000-tote milestone in November 2025 at roughly 98% accuracy.

That’s an impressive service record, and it’s resulted in a $300 million order book.

As of May 2026, Agility reported more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders for its next-generation humanoid, which turned out to be Digit 5. In reporting around its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI — a $2.5 billion deal announced in June that would make Agility the first pure-play humanoid company on western public markets – that figure was described as representing roughly 1,000 robots under a robots-as-a-service model.

That’s not cheap: Agility’s June investor deck modeled about $8,500 per robot per month. But if it is for 20-hour days, that’s about 2.5 human shifts each day.

Early access to Digit 5 will begin in the first half of 2027, Johnson told me in an interview. General availability for manufacturing, warehouse and distribution operators will come later, near the end of 2027.

Digit 5 is being assembled at RoboFab, Agility’s 70,000-square-foot plant in Salem, Oregon, which is designed to eventually build up to 10,000 robots a year. That bodes well for Agility Robotics given the FCC ban on foreign robots . Peggy Johnson echoed commentary I’ve heard from other U.S.-based robotics CEOs , suggesting that the FCC ban would not only not be a problem for Agility, but should be good for it’s go-to-market potential.

Digit 5’s hardware upgrades from Digit 4

The hardware upgrades are substantial.

As I mentioned earlier, Digit 5 will lift up to 50 pounds repeatedly — 40% more than Digit 4 — via a new leg design and proprietary cycloidal actuators. That’s enough to cover single-person lift tasks in OSHA-regulated facilities. Thanks to its height, Digit 5 can reach 7.2 feet in the air, up from 5.5. And the robots 10:1 run-to-charge ratio is significantly better than Digit 4’s 2:1, driving the more than 20 hours of productive work per 24-hour day that Agility is promising.

That battery math holds up: 99-minute charge-and-run cycles will deliver roughly 21 hours of work.

But per-charge runtime actually is going down with Digit 5: Digit 4 ran about four hours on a charge. Digit 5 runs 90 minutes and makes it up by charging faster. Total daily work availability went up; individual shift time went down.

Digit 5 did gain a bit of weight compared to Digit 4. 284 pounds is not light; Digit 4 was well under 200. Redundant sensing, an independent safety controller, and legs engineered for repetitive heavy lifting all have weight, and that weight impacts the payload ratio: Digit 5 carries about 18% of its own mass, down from roughly 22-25% for Digit 4.

Agility isn’t the only one outside the cage

The cage-free pitch is not unique.

Boston Dynamics began production on the redesigned Atlas this year and plans to deliver the first units to Hyundai’s Metaplant application center and Google DeepMind soon. Atlas carries up to 66 pounds, reaches 7.5 feet, runs four hours on a hot-swappable pack, and Boston Dynamics explicitly describes an onboard safety system for detecting people and vehicles that enables “fenceless guarding,” plus padding and reduced pinch points.

On paper, that’s more payload, more reach, longer stints and a comparable safety story.

Agility does lead in paperwork and hours. In November 2025 Digit became the first humanoid to pass a field evaluation by a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory — an OSHA-recognized certifier — on a live customer fulfillment line, assessed against ANSI/RIA R15.08, ISO 13849 and ISO 12100. That evaluation was specific to that site’s configuration, of course, and not a blanket approval, but it’s still the closest thing this industry has to a regulator-adjacent green light.

The proof, as always, will be in the pudding.

Agility’s multiple safety factors are almost over-aggressive right now, Johnson told me. But eventually, as the AI improves and the safety track record demonstrates, Digit should be able to work in even closer proximity to humans, perhaps as close and humans work with each other.

Then we’ll really have steel team-mates on the production line.