The Robot I Didn’t Expect to Build

Author and Agility Robotics co-founder Jonathan Hurst next to his new Digit 5 humanoid robot worker.

Agility Robotics, the company I cofounded out of my robotics lab at Oregon State University in 2015, has just launched Digit 5. It’s designed to be the first humanoid robot that can safely and economically do useful work at scale, allowing us to bring tens of thousands of humanoid workers into the real world. Engineered to lift 23-kilogram bins onto high shelves and with a battery that can run for 90 minutes on a 9-minute charge, Digit 5’s goal is to handle heavy warehouse tasks shift after shift, filling the need for labor in jobs that are too physically stressful or too dull for humans to want to do.

Digit 5 is what Agility has been working toward for over a decade. But the robot is heavy and bulky, lacking the graceful natural motion of its predecessors, and it’s farther than I thought possible from the robot I dreamed of building when I started this company. To deliver a useful commercial product, Agility has taken a path that is very different from what I first imagined.

From ATRIAS to Digit

My dream has always been to build robots that combine locomotion and manipulation to move through the world and interact with it as people do. I seek a mastery of motion, achieved through devices designed to navigate the constraints of physics with elegance. When I started the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State in 2008, we began with a theory derived from decades of work in biomechanics: that a simple “spring-mass” model (a body supported by legs that act like springs) should be able to reproduce every known walking and running gait found in animals.

We put theory into practice by building the bipedal robot ATRIAS—short for “Assume The Robot Is A Sphere,” a joke among physicists about reducing a complex system to its simplest possible form. ATRIAS looked like a large microwave on stilts because it was only intended to demonstrate the physics of human walking and running. This was the first glimmer of achieving my dream; even though ATRIAS wasn’t designed to look like us, it still seemed natural, and even somehow alive, when it settled into a walking gait.

With the success of ATRIAS, the barriers to progress shifted from scientific to engineering and organizational, and a startup company seemed like the way to bridge the gap from a one-off research concept to an actual robotic product. I felt confident of two things: that I would be able to build robots that could go where people go, and that this capability would be incredibly useful. This combination of ambition and naivete is necessary for anyone to found a new company—how hard could it be?

Good advice for starting a company is to understand a customer problem, and then find a way to solve it using your unique capabilities. My cofounders, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones, and I did not do this. We relied on our belief that this technology would enable new possibilities and trusted ourselves to figure out the business as we went. So we simply focused on building our first product: the bipedal robot Cassie.

Cassie was the first dynamic bipedal robot that researchers could buy, able to maintain its balance through active, fluid motion rather than careful, rigid steps. It had ostrichlike legs, not because we were imitating ground-running birds, but as a result of engineering strictly for performance. It was not intended to be commercially useful, and had no torso, arms, or head. We sold Cassie robots to Harvard, Caltech, the University of Michigan, the University of California, Berkeley, and a handful of other research institutions, ultimately saturating the market for US $250,000 bipedal research robots after having sold a total of 10 of them.

ATRIAS, Cassie, and Digit 4 EVT [left to right] are on display at Agility Robotics’ RoboFab in Salem, Ore. The 70,000-square-foot facility has the capacity to produce more than 10,000 Digit 5 robots per year.Agility Robotics

Because Cassie’s hardware enabled research into the physics of walking and running, the legged-robot research frontier shifted to control software. Traditionally, engineers controlled legged robots with detailed mathematical models that determined how the machines should move. With Cassie, researchers pioneered the new approach of reinforcement learning for bipedal legged locomotion: A simulated robot learns through trial and error, and the resulting neural network controls the physical machine. This approach is what enables virtually all of the dynamic behaviors that you see on legged robots today, and Cassie looked alive as it recovered from stumbles while climbing stairs, ran 5 kilometers across the Oregon State campus, and broke the robot world record for a 100-meter dash.

Cassie got us closer to being able to move through the world with confidence and grace, but to make it useful, we needed manipulation. After exhaustively exploring different configurations, we found that an upright torso helped the robot balance, while two arms mounted near the top of the torso allowed it to pick up large objects and to catch itself when it fell. Digit 1, which added a torso and arms to the Cassie legs, was our first mobile manipulation robot, and another step on the path toward a product that could do useful work for commercial customers.

Why Digit Began With Warehouse Bins

As we explored the first applications for Digit, potential customers kept asking us: Why legs? And why a humanoid? These were tough questions for me to answer, because they exposed a core business reality: It didn’t matter to Agility Robotics if we solved a cool science problem in a beautiful way. What mattered to the business was solving real problems for customers.

After years of engagement with industry partners, we found one answer in warehouses and manufacturing facilities: moving bins. Bin handling is a clearly defined task where two arms are needed to lift large bins up high and legs are the best way to balance and move in narrow spaces. Because the task can vary widely from one deployment to another, it hasn’t been broadly addressed by single-purpose automation. Yet it was constrained enough to give Digit an economically viable first job while it developed a broader set of skills.

In 2019, Digit began demonstrating its capabilities to do real work. With Ford Motor Company, we showed how Digit 1 could carry packages from an autonomous vehicle to a front porch. We developed Digit 2 and 3 while working with a certain global package delivery company on moving and sorting cardboard boxes. Amazon tested Digit 4 on moving and stacking bins, and it became the world’s first commercially deployed humanoid at the logistics provider GXO. In 2024, Digit appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Despite Digit’s apparent success, we began to run into conflicts between my dream and the needs of actual customers. We were no longer working with relatively patient university research labs. Agility has to sell robots to survive, and customers will only purchase robots that provide value. If bins weren’t moving, our customers were losing money. We spent a huge amount of time and effort keeping our first deployments operational, which arguably eliminated any profit we made. Yet this also kept our company learning and alive the way no lab demo ever could.

I had no idea how hard it would be, or that running a company would involve so many things that have nothing to do with solving technical problems: deployments across the country; shipping, service, and customer support; fundraising and investor relations; more fundraising; human resources and IT; developing fleet-management software; managing a supply chain; and even more fundraising. I had no experience with any of these things. My career had focused on solving the technical challenges of robots interacting with the world, and it turned out that was only a tiny piece of building a successful robotics company. But Agility was the only path I saw to continuing the technical work and having an impact.

Turning Digit Into a Product

I knew that Agility needed to focus more on robots as a product, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. Hiring the people we needed to run the company meant giving up an immense amount of control, but we had no other choice. We recruited a new executive team with the experience required to commercialize this new technology, and they quickly made changes that were both painful and necessary.

Digit versions 1, 2, and 3 [left to right] show the evolution of the robot from a dynamic walking platform into a useful mobile manipulator. Agility

We had intended the next revision of Digit, Digit 4 EVT (Engineering Validation and Test), to be a relatively minor upgrade. But Agility’s new leadership insisted that the robot was missing key features that were essential if Digit was going to become a real product. So Digit 4 EVT instead incorporated a series of major changes in a highly compressed timeline, such as larger batteries and system-wide upgrades for safety and regulatory compliance, which added enough mass to dramatically alter the robot’s appearance and capabilities.

While early Digits were headless, Agility Robotics was able to justify a head for Digit 4 to optimize antenna and camera placement, and it turned out to be surprisingly useful for human-robot interaction.Christie Hemm Klok

I could only watch as others brought their own talents to bear to make Digit into a successful product, in gut-wrenching ways that didn’t always align with my vision. There were some especially difficult times when I felt like there were compromises made that didn’t seem necessary, but making those decisions was no longer my sole responsibility. I had to accept that Digit had grown far beyond me, and look for ways of influencing decisions rather than directing them. In the moment, it was incredibly frustrating, as Digit 4 EVT took a few steps backward from my vision of how humanoids should look and move.

Agility is in our name because agility is core to the future of the company. I want Digit to be lithe and graceful. When people see Digit, I want them to like the robot, to understand what it can do at a glance, and to feel that it’s there to help. But with Digit 4 EVT, all of that was sacrificed to functionality, because of course it had to be—the customer just needs the robot to do the work. The design process became a ruthless triage, with aesthetics and elegance of movement being delayed over and over again in favor of brutal functionality. For an engineer whose mind lives more in the future than in the present, it has been hard for me to accept this trajectory. And yet, through Digit 4 EVT’s commercial deployments, we began to really understand specific applications and what they required. We mapped the first 10 use cases Digit would perform, and then began designing Digit 5 from scratch based on everything we had learned.

Digit 5 will be Agility’s first real step toward a general-purpose robot. It marks our transition from imagining what a future humanoid robot should be to designing a product around the realities of customer deployments. These realities include things like European CE regulatory compliance, North American UL electrical-safety certifications, and Federal Communications Commission limits for electromagnetic radiation—all of which felt tangential to my dream for Digit, but were absolute requirements.

Digit 5 is designed to be the first humanoid robot that can operate safely next to human coworkers while working 20 hours a day and lifting more than a human can.Christie Hemm Klok

Customer requirements helped us realize that safety in particular was one of the most critical barriers to scaling. In Digit 4’s commercial deployments, the robots had to work behind physical barriers, separated from humans at all times, to meet insurance and regulatory demands. This seemed silly to me, because I’ve never felt that our robots were dangerous, but we have to prove that they’re safe. And since keeping the robots in safety cages severely limited their usefulness, enabling Digit 5 to operate safely around people became a primary design goal. We spent two years on this challenge.

Digit 5 is designed to be the first humanoid robot that can operate safely next to human coworkers. It will rely on an array of sensors to locate nearby people in a manner that’s certifiably safe, and then take actions based on that information. As a person approaches, Digit 5 is programmed to stop what it’s doing, set down its payload, sit on the floor, and cut power to its motors before the person gets close enough to touch the robot. This conservative approach reduces the risk to nearby people in a verifiable way, and we believe it’s the only approach that makes sense as a first step toward working alongside humans.

Yet this strategy also feels like a massive slowdown on the path toward robots becoming part of everyday life. Enabling coexistence with humans has influenced almost every aspect of Digit 5’s design: the shape of the legs and the body, the safety-rated sensors within protective housings, the isolated computers dedicated to safety, and more. All of these features increase the robot’s complexity, power consumption, mass, and physical size.

Digit 5 is Agility’s largest, heaviest, strongest, and most capable humanoid robot worker.

The robot’s design was driven by safety, with integrated protection for the robot and for the humans it will work around.Agility Robotics

Weighing over 120 kg, Digit 5 is a huge robot. It needed to achieve the lifting limits recommended under the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health guidelines for human workers, which include repeatedly lifting 23-kg bins and reaching shelves 1.75 meters high. Digit is designed to perform tasks like these for 20 hours a day—something no human can do. This requires motors with enough power and torque to lift the load, but also enough precision to delicately control the force Digit applies when it makes contact with the world. To power those motors, we needed a large battery and a dock for rapid autonomous charging. The dock will deliver 240 amperes at 48 volts, which is enough current to make its thick charging cables visibly wiggle under the induced magnetic forces, while powerful fans blow air through cooling channels in the robot’s torso to keep the battery from overheating. The battery and cooling system takes up about 75 percent of Digit’s torso, but it will allow the robot to operate for 90 minutes and fully recharge during a 9-minute break, enabling near-continuous work.

All of this extra bulk means that Digit 5 can no longer run or jump the way previous generations could, and the svelte form I imagined has become physically impossible. In some ways, Digit 5 feels more like a forklift than the graceful humanoid I set out to build. But looking at the situation rationally, I believe this trade-off is necessary for any company that claims its humanoid can do this kind of work today: If you see a robot that looks like a human working in a factory or warehouse, it either can’t lift the required weight or can’t make it through the whole shift. And if it’s not covered with sensors, it’s likely not safe to stand next to.

The most visible change with Digit 5 is that humanlike legs replace the ostrichlike legs of our earlier versions. While the “backward” leg configuration was optimized for walking and running, we discovered that it created problems with squatting because the ankle will strike the ground. Digit 5 will spend a lot of time lifting heavy objects from near the floor, so we used a humanoid leg configuration with knee and hip motors that both contribute torque to help the robot stand up again.

When Digit detects an approaching human, the robot will lower itself to the floor and cut power to its motors. Agility believes this is the only near-term approach to verifiably reduce risk when the robot is working near people.Agility Robotics

Other companies building humanoid robots have copied the human form without ever understanding its purpose. It’s very frustrating that, to an outside observer, it now looks like we discarded Agility’s distinctive leg design and simply did what everyone else was doing. Yet I know that we arrived at this shape based purely on functional engineering choices. Making a robot look like a human is the easy part—without the function to match, and the understanding of the physics underlying that function, the whole point of the human form may be lost.

With the power, battery life, and safety features that we are designing into Digit 5, we will have a truly useful robot. But it also compromises on some things that are core to my vision and mission. I understand why we made the choices we did and can justify them all, but together they leave me unsatisfied. It’s the curse of the engineer.

What Comes After Digit 5

I believe Digit 5 will be the scaling moment for Agility Robotics, the inflection point where we can begin deploying robots in large numbers. While the robot will continue carrying bins, our road map includes many more tasks, from picking individual items and tending machines, to preparing parts for assembly and shipping, and eventually doing assembly work itself. Its interchangeable tool interfaces and modular design will enable us to gradually upgrade its subsystems. It will be a platform for improvement, a source of data for future behavior training, and a viable product all at the same time.

Hurst stands between the previous version of Digit, Digit 4 EVT [left], and Digit 5.Christie Hemm Klok

But I cannot love Digit 5. It’s the largest, heaviest, most expensive robot Agility will ever build, full of design compromises that enable it to be exactly the robot it needs to be right now rather than the robot I dreamed of. In the beginning, I envisioned steady progress on agility and dexterity, with each version becoming more dynamically capable. Instead, developing Digit 5 has required large detours to incorporate requirements that seemed unrelated to my original vision. However, I now recognize that tackling these challenges was always necessary. Customers and product requirements didn’t ruin my vision; they revealed what my vision was missing. This is how robots will achieve commercial success and make a real-world impact, which will bring me closer to my scientific dream as well.

We won’t have a humanoid that matches the capabilities of humans until it achieves that mastery of motion that inspired me to found Agility over a decade ago. I saw glimmers of it with the spring-mass locomotion of ATRIAS, and more glimmers with Cassie’s running gait.

I know that such mastery is physically possible with the tools and hardware that we have right now, and despite all of its compromises, Digit 5 will give us a practical foundation for pursuing that dream. I want every future version of Digit to be lighter and more graceful, to interact more naturally with humans, and to be better at manipulating objects and moving through the world, enabling robots to enter aspects of our lives that they haven’t been able to help with before. By the time I’m old enough to need assistance at home, I expect Digit will be up to the task.

With Digit 5, Agility has built a robot that will be useful in our world. Now I’m getting back to work to make it beautiful, too.

This article appears in the November 2026 print issue.