Agility Robotics has launched Digit 5, a humanoid robot designed for warehouse work. According to the company, it can lift 23-kilogram bins onto high shelves and run for 90 minutes on a 9-minute charge. The goal is to deploy tens of thousands of these robots to take over physically stressful or monotonous jobs that are hard to fill with human workers.
Co-founder Jonathan Hurst, however, describes the machine as a compromise. Writing in IEEE Spectrum, he says Digit 5 is heavy and bulky, lacking the graceful, almost alive motion of earlier research robots like ATRIAS and Cassie. Those machines were built to explore the physics of walking, and later learned dynamic behaviors through reinforcement learning. Digit 5, by contrast, was shaped by customer questions such as "Why legs?" and "Why a humanoid?" — and by the business need to solve real problems rather than pursue an elegant ideal.
Hurst acknowledges that the path to a commercial product has been very different from what he originally imagined. Still, he frames Digit 5 as the culmination of over a decade of work, even if it is farther from his dream than he expected.