Agility's Digit 5 drops the bird legs, claims 22.7 kg lifts
New legs, a two-finger gripper and a safety controller that can cut motor power, all of it company spec for now.
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, and the first thing you notice is the knees. The ostrich-style backwards legs are gone, replaced with forward-oriented human-like ones. Steve Crowe lists new legs, better battery life and swappable end effectors among the upgrades.
The most important change is the design for safety. Digit 5 can work near people. It stops or kneels when people approach
Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst was blunt that this is not about looking human. Lukas Ziegler quotes him saying the old configuration was optimized for very good walking and running, and the new one is optimized for lifting heavy things and getting up and down off the ground a lot.
The numbers Agility is claiming
Per Ziegler's writeup, Digit 5 does repeatable lifts up to 22.7 kg on proprietary cycloidal actuators, which covers single-person lift tasks in OSHA-regulated facilities. It runs 90 minutes of work on 9 minutes to full charge, a 10 to 1 run-to-charge ratio, up from 2 to 1 on Digit 4, which Agility says puts it past 20 working hours in a 24-hour day. The robot is 129 kg and 1.81 m tall, reaching to 2.2 m, up from 1.68 m.
The hands argument is the spicy part. Hurst says general-purpose hands do not exist, are not on the market and are not coming soon. His evidence is Cybathlon, where amputees compete at manipulation tasks using prosthetics, and the winner two years running used a single-degree-of-freedom parallel-jaw gripper with one rotation at the wrist, beating competitors with five-fingered hands. So Digit 5 ships a two-finger gripper, swappable through ISO-standard mounting flanges.
Safety is the actual headline
Crowe calls the design for safety the most important change. Digit 5 has 360 degree person detection with no fixed safety zones. It slows, stops, or sits down and cuts motor power before anyone can touch it, with an independent safety controller overseeing the response.
That split is what people in the field picked at. Mandar Wagh argued an AI person detector is necessary but cannot be the part you certify, describing the Digit 5 setup as AI detection supervised by an independent safety controller with a CAT1 stop. Chris Paxton's reply was short, that self driving cars made it work.
Shown versus claimed. Nothing here has been measured or deployed by anyone outside Agility. Early access is H1 2027, general availability by the end of 2027, and this is the first Digit sold outside North America, starting with the EU and UK with a CE mark expected. Agility's numbers have been scrutinized before, including its SPAC filing showing $1.8M revenue.
The previous leg configuration was really optimized for very good walking and running. The new configuration is optimized for lifting heavy things and getting up and down off the ground a lot.
the model decides what's nearby, something verifiable decides when to stop.