Agility and FORT Robotics team up to make Digit 5 safe around people

Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics signed a memorandum of understanding on October 1 to build out the safety infrastructure for Digit 5, Agility’s next-generation humanoid — a machine the company describes as its first engineered for “cooperatively safe work at scale.”

The partnership deepens a multi-year relationship that began with a single custom hardware component. It now spans a three-part safety architecture: a safety pendant, on-robot communications, and off-robot interfaces connecting Digit to external safety systems. The off-robot piece — jointly developed and called the Offboard Safety Bridge — is designed to extend Digit’s safety envelope beyond the robot itself, letting signals from surrounding equipment interact with its safety controls.

The MOU also sets up a broader operating framework covering joint hardware development, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance, and deployment support as Digit 5 moves into warehouses, manufacturing plants, and logistics facilities.

The context: earlier Digit robots have logged more than 65,000 operating hours at customer sites including Schaeffler, GXO, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, according to Agility. Safety is the gating factor for humanoids working shoulder-to-shoulder with people — and whoever proves it first wins the deployment race.

“Physical AI only earns trust when the safety layer around it is as capable and as accountable as the robot itself,” said FORT founder and CEO Samuel Reeves.