Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics are working together enhance the safety system for Digit 5, Agility’s next-generation humanoid robot designed to work right alongside people with no safety cage. The calling card for Digit 5 is “no more safety cages:” a humanoid that can work in close proximity to humans. But the future likely isn’t just one humanoid operating in a factory. So the question becomes: how do you make a whole humanoid fleet safe for humans to be around?

“Digit 5 is already designed to operate safely in close proximity to humans,” the Agility spokesperson told me via email. “Agility will unite its AI-based cooperative safety system for Digit 5 with a trifecta of ‘outside in’ safety approaches from FORT to add a second, independent layer of protection that supports continuity of safety coverage as a deployment grows from one robot to a fleet.”

Digit 5’s onboard safety systems include safe human detection, safety cues and safe motion control. FORT, which Agility has been work with for years, is contributing an “outside in” approach in three parts: a safety pendant for nearby robot attendants, on-robot communications, and off-robot interfaces that connect Digit 5 units with safety systems already installed in a customer’s facility.

The pendant is a physical device that a nearby human robot manager can use to shut down Digit 5 in an emergency. It also includes a hold-to-run switch in which the robot will proceed for as long as the robot manager is pressing the button, something that would be useful when the robot is operating in dangerous, fragile, or otherwise awkward environments. Digit 5 works autonomously during normal operations, so the pendant is an extra layer for monitoring and manual override.

Another piece is the Offboard Safety Bridge, which FORT and Agility built together. It extends Digit’s safety logic beyond the robot’s own sensors to the environment around it.

“Every layer we’ve added with FORT has made Digit’s safety system more resilient, not just more redundant,” Agility CTO Pras Velagapudi said in a statement. “The Offboard Safety Bridge is a good example of what this partnership is really about: building safety infrastructure that works whether the input is coming from onboard the robot, or from the environment around it, so the robot can be trusted to operate near people in a more diverse set of environments.”

That matters increasingly more as deployments grow. One robot in a pilot is a fairly contained situation. But a fleet working across a warehouse, near forklifts and conveyors and people, is kind of everywhere.

These two systems, along with enhanced on-robot communications, will ship with Digit 5 in 2027, the spokesperson told me.

Fort is an eight-year-old company that, interestingly, is also going public via SPAC. (Agility Robotics is going public via SPAC in a $2.5 billion deal.) Customers include DoorDash (which has its own delivery robots) as well as Zoox (the Amazon-owned robotaxi service and Google DeepMind, Google’s division behind the physical AI vision-language-action models in Gemini Robotics.

“Agility has established itself as the leader in humanoid robotics by focusing on the only metrics that matter: safety and ROI,” FORT founder and CEO Samuel Reeves said in a statement. “Physical AI only earns trust when the safety layer around it is as capable and as accountable as the robot itself.”

This should help persuade potential customers, who probably face legal liability if a robot injures a human, that Digit 5 is safe to be around.

“For customers looking to deploy fleets of humanoids for production, safety is the long pole in the tent — it’s what a customer’s EHS and insurance teams need answered before they’ll sign a deal,” the Agility spokesperson told me. “Adding a formalized, independently built safety architecture, backed by a company customers already trust, shortens that conversation.”

We should see that in action some time in 2027. Hopefully early in the year rather than late.