Agility Robotics Enhances Digit Humanoid for Warehouse Integration and Safety

Agility Robotics, known for its bipedal robot Digit, has announced a series of upgrades aimed at making the humanoid more practical for deployment in warehouse and logistics environments. Revealed recently at the ProMat trade show, the enhancements focus on operational improvements, expanded capabilities, and tighter integration with existing warehouse automation.

Key Upgrades for Practical Deployment

The updates address several core aspects of deploying robots in real-world settings:

Endurance and Charging: Digit now boasts more efficient battery capabilities, extending its operational runtime to potentially four hours. Critically, the robot can now autonomously dock with its charging station, reducing the need for human intervention and enabling more continuous operation.
Manipulation: New limb and end-effector designs give Digit a wider range of motion and grasping angles. This unlocks potential for new tasks involving complex manipulation, showcased in demonstrations like tote stacking/unstacking and handling items on flowracks.
Safety Enhancements: Agility has incorporated several industrial safety features, including a Category 1 (CAT1) controlled stop, an on-board Safety PLC, physical E-stop buttons, a wireless teach pendant with an integrated E-stop, and the FailSafe over EtherCAT (FSoE) protocol. While safety standards specifically for dynamically stable humanoid robots are still evolving, these additions align Digit more closely with established industrial safety practices, aiming towards eventual cooperative work alongside humans in OSHA-regulated spaces.
Streamlined Manufacturing: The company also mentioned efforts to streamline Digit's manufacturing process, hinting at improved scalability for future customer deployments.

Bridging Automation Gaps with AMR Integration

A significant focus of the announcement is Digit's enhanced ability to work alongside Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), a common fixture in modern warehouses. Agility emphasizes that humanoids and AMRs have complementary strengths – AMRs for efficient long-distance transport, and humanoids like Digit for complex manipulation and navigating human-centric spaces.

Through Agility's cloud platform, Agility Arc, Digit can now communicate with and dispatch AMRs from providers like MiR and Zebra Technologies. This allows Digit to perform tasks like picking items and then autonomously calling an AMR to transport them, bridging previously disconnected automation workflows. This capability is reportedly already in use at a GXO facility deployment near Atlanta and was demonstrated live at ProMat.

Agility Arc and Expanded Use Cases

The Agility Arc platform serves as the command center for managing fleets of Digits. Recent updates extend its capabilities beyond AMR integration to include improved support, monitoring, maintenance tools, and expanded integration options with enterprise systems like Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).

These platform and hardware upgrades enable Digit to tackle a wider array of potential warehouse tasks demonstrated at ProMat, including loading/unloading AMRs, palletizing/depalletizing, interacting with putwalls, and goods-to-person (G2P) sorting operations.

Focus on Real-World Application

Agility continues to emphasize its strategy of learning through real-world deployment and close customer collaboration. By placing Digit units in commercial facilities, the company aims to gather practical data, refine skills, and demonstrate the value proposition of humanoid robots in logistics. These latest updates represent a step towards making Digit a more robust and integrated component of the automated warehouse.