Digit v5 is getting OUT OF THE CAGE: chat with Agility Robotic's CBO Daniel Diez

The next version of Agility Robotics humanoid robot, Digit v5, will work outside of cages cooperatively and safely with people, Agility's chief business officer Daniel Diez just told me in episode 12 of Humanoid Daily.

What's holding humanoid robots back? Most people think it's

• AI's not good enough
• Hands aren't dextrous enough
• Batteries don't last long enough
• Reliability just isn't there yet
• Speed is too slow

Actually, it's something quite different, Diez says:

"It's probably the biggest misconception that what's holding back these robots are skills or AI or batteries," Diez told me. "The truth of the matter is what holds back large-scale deployments of humanoid robots is their inability to work outside of safety parameters or safety cages."

That is the problem Agility says it is about to solve.

The big news is that in December, the company plans to begin deploying Digit V5 to early customers.

Diez calls Digit v5 "the world's first cooperatively safe robot, a robot capable of working in close proximity with people and ensuring their safety at the same time." Mass scaling will after, once the safety systems are verified in real operations. Today, pretty much every humanoid robot working in a warehouse or factory operates cordoned off behind safety fencing, physically separated from the humans around it.

That separation is a massive tax on deploying humanoid robots. It:

• eats floor space
• requires expensive renovations
• changes traffic patterns
• interrupts work flows

In a lot of facilities it simply isn't possible: the space is too tight to wrap a cage around a robot. Taking the cage away is huge.

"Opening up the safety cages, basically removing them, allows people to be able to walk by certain areas and the robots to be integrated more holistically into a working factory or a working warehouse," Diez said.

It's the difference between a robot you have to build a room around and one that just walks in and gets to work. He expects it to open up not just new use cases but entire verticals — retail and pharmaceutical among them — where a fenced robot was a non-starter. "This will open up the ability to work with a great number of customers who we've had to say, wait for the next-generation robot."

Digit v5 is much more than a cobot humanoid robot, though. It looks to be an impressive iteration with a lot of new features.

1. More safety features: not just one technology but a stack including an algorithm to detect people using cameras and sensors, the ability to understand what it's seeing, and — critically — the physical capability to react in a way that keeps humans safe. That last part leans on hardware V4 already had. Digit's proprietary cycloidal actuators in its hips and knees give it the strength and dynamic stability to react without dropping a payload or falling over. Agility has tested this by literally pulling the rug out from under Digit; it takes a quick half-step, catches itself, and keeps the payload. "Second to safety is that dynamic stability, which, by the way, is a core part of safety," Diez said.
2. 20 hours of work a day: customers wanted one robot that could cover a three-shift operation, not a fleet handing off to each other. V5 gets new battery technology with rapid charging that Diez says lets a single robot work more than 20 hours a day. "Now the unit economics get really interesting when you really only deploy one robot across three shifts of operation."
3. Swappable end effectors (and, eventually self-swappable): Digit v5 adds an ISO flange — a standardized connector at the end of the arm — so Digit can use the enormous existing catalog of end effectors built up over decades of robotics, and eventually swap them itself. Agility has already demoed Digit setting a gripper into a holder, twisting it off, and picking up another. Because these robots run autonomously, with no teleoperation, the vision is a robot that gets tasked, realizes it needs a different hand, walks over, changes tools, and gets on with the job. That also pushes Digit from bulk material handling toward more delicate work like kitting and sorting ... exactly what early customers are asking for next.

Speed is often a concern for humanoid robots.

When you see many of the walking ... they don't look like championship race walkers, to put it mildly. And hand speed matters too. But Digit is already faster than the process it's been injected into, Diez says. And human-level parity isn't always the right metric.

At Schaeffler's South Carolina plant, Digit loads greasy parts into an industrial washer faster than the washer can ingest them. Diez' point: filling labor gaps beats racing humans.

"It isn't always necessary to be faster than a human. It's can I process more work in the same time period than the alternative?" Or, at a price below the fully burdened cost of a human, "if they could even find that person," he adds.

I'm looking forward to seeing Digit v5 in December.