Agility Robotics is shipping Digit to warehouses, slowly and on purpose
Agility has the rare position of running humanoids inside real customer warehouses today. Its careful approach to scale is the opposite of the rest of the industry.
Image credit: Photo by Petrebels on Unsplash · source
Most humanoid companies are racing to announce. Agility Robotics is shipping. Slowly, deliberately, and on terms that look nothing like the demo-cycle being run by its rivals.
The Information reports that Agility has shipped roughly 100 Digit humanoids to logistics customers in the last twelve months. The company's CEO put the strategy plainly.
We could have shipped a thousand and broken a thousand. We chose 100. — Agility Robotics CEO (via The Information)
What 100 humanoids actually means
In any other industry, a hundred units is not a story. In commercial humanoid robotics, it is the most production hardware anyone has put in front of paying customers.
Robotics Business Review puts unit prices in the 250,000 dollar range, with services contracts attached. That is a meaningful number. It is comparable to a high-end forklift plus a service plan, and it is being paid by logistics customers in tote-handling environments.
The two-leg trade-off
Digit is bipedal but not strictly humanoid. It does not have a face. Its legs bend in a different direction from human knees. The design choice is not aesthetic — it is mechanical.
Birds, not people, are the closest natural analogue. Agility explicitly designed the leg topology to make balance and recovery easier for current control software. Three years ago that looked like a hedge. Today it looks like a sensible engineering call.
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