Agility Robotics

Agility Robotics, Inc., publicly branded as Agility since March 2026, is an American robotics company that develops bipedal robots for industrial work. The company grew out of the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State University and states that it was founded in 2015. Its principal products are the Digit humanoid robot and Arc, cloud software for deploying and managing robot fleets. Agility is headquartered in Salem, Oregon, with engineering operations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fremont, California.^[1][2]

Digit is designed for material handling in warehouses, distribution centers, and manufacturing plants. Publicly documented work includes a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service deployment at GXO Logistics, tests at Amazon, and commercial agreements with Schaeffler, Mercado Libre, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.^{[11][15][17][21][22]} These programs differ in maturity and scope. Some are paid deployments, while others began as tests or pilots, and most published performance figures come from Agility or its customers rather than independent audits.

As of July 28, 2026, Agility remained a private company. It had entered a definitive agreement to combine with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company, but the transaction had not closed and remained subject to shareholder, regulatory, and listing approvals.^[24]

History

Research origins and founding

Agility's technical lineage began with ATRIAS, a human-scale research biped built in Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. ATRIAS was designed around a spring-mass model of walking and running. Its four-bar, series-elastic legs and onboard power enabled untethered three-dimensional stepping, while experiments showed that the machine could reproduce important center-of-mass dynamics from the simplified model.^[3] ATRIAS was a university research platform, not an Agility commercial product.

Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones founded Agility to commercialize work from the Oregon State laboratory. Hurst led the laboratory's research on dynamic bipedal locomotion, Jones worked on robot controls, and Shelton became the company's first chief executive. Agility's current corporate history dates the founding to 2015, although some older Oregon State publications describe the spinout as occurring in 2016.^[1][2] The difference appears to reflect the start of the company versus later university reporting, so the earlier date should not be treated as an exact incorporation date without a corporate filing.

Cassie and the first Digit

Cassie, a leg-only biped, first walked in 2016 and was introduced as a research platform in 2017. Oregon State reported that its development was supported by a 16-month, $1 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Cassie carried forward the lab's compliant, dynamically balanced leg design while providing a platform on which researchers could study learned locomotion.^[1][5]

Agility publicly unveiled Digit on February 19, 2019. The first design added a torso, two four-degree-of-freedom arms, sensors, and additional computing to the Cassie leg platform. At the time, Agility reported that the prototype could lift and stack boxes weighing up to 40 pounds, while deliveries were planned for the first quarter of 2020.^[7] A January 2020 agreement with Ford explored using Digit with an autonomous vehicle for last-mile delivery research. Ford received the first two production units, but the project did not become a large commercial deployment.^[8]

Agility reported in October 2020 that Digit had been shipping to customers since July of that year. The same announcement disclosed a $20 million funding round and said the company had raised $29 million in total at that point.^[9]

Shift toward industrial deployment

In March 2023, Agility introduced a redesigned Digit for logistics work. The new design used tote-oriented end effectors and added a head and eye display intended to make robot status and motion easier for nearby workers to interpret. Early access ran through the Agility Partner Program.^[13] The company subsequently concentrated its commercial work on repetitive material-handling steps that connect existing conveyors, autonomous mobile robots, and storage systems.

Agility announced RoboFab, its Salem manufacturing facility, in September 2023. It launched Arc fleet-management software in March 2024 and signed its first publicly documented multi-year humanoid Robots-as-a-Service agreement with GXO that June.^[12][14][15]

Peggy Johnson became chief executive officer on March 4, 2024, succeeding Shelton, who moved from the chief executive role into other company and board positions.^[16] Agility's current leadership page lists Shelton as co-founder and chairman of the board.^[1]

Public brand and legal name

On March 5, 2026, the company changed its public brand from "Agility Robotics" to "Agility." The company said the shorter name was intended to accommodate products and services beyond its original scope.^[23] Securities filings and the proposed merger agreement continued to use the legal name Agility Robotics, Inc.; the rebrand did not itself establish a change in the corporate legal entity.^[24]

Robot platforms

ATRIAS

ATRIAS, short for "Assume The Robot Is A Sphere," was designed to embody a reduced-order spring-mass model. The published 2016 design paper describes a 171 cm, 62 kg research robot with onboard batteries, real-time control, wireless communication, and series-elastic legs. Its purpose was to test whether control laws derived from a simpler locomotion model could produce stable behavior on a full three-dimensional machine.^[3]

ATRIAS established several engineering ideas that continued into Agility's later robots: concentrating mass near the body, keeping leg inertia low, using mechanical compliance, and controlling balance dynamically rather than requiring the robot to pause in statically stable poses. The research platform lacked the perception and manipulation systems needed for industrial work.

Cassie

Cassie retained the bipedal research focus but was built as a repeatable platform for university and industrial laboratories. It has two legs and no torso, arms, or head. Its joint and spring arrangement lets researchers test controllers for walking, running, and disturbance recovery without first building a complete humanoid.

Peer-reviewed work on Cassie demonstrated that locomotion policies trained in simulation could transfer to the physical robot. A 2020 Conference on Robot Learning paper documented an iterative reinforcement-learning process and transferred variable-speed policies to Cassie without dynamics randomization or physical-robot fine-tuning.^[4] This result concerned locomotion control on the research platform; it did not establish that Cassie or Digit could learn arbitrary warehouse tasks.

Cassie also served as an experimental platform for longer-distance running:

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Oregon State attributed both programs to neural-network control developed with reinforcement learning in simulation. The demonstrations showed locomotion capability under their test conditions, not general industrial reliability.^[5][6]

Digit

Digit combines Agility's legged locomotion system with a torso, arms, perception sensors, onboard computing, and task-specific end effectors. The 2023 industrial redesign concentrated on moving standardized totes and interfacing with equipment already used in warehouses.^[13]

The deployed Digit v4 and planned Digit v5 should be distinguished:

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The v4 figures are published product specifications or reported operating characteristics.^[18][25] Every v5 figure in the table comes from Agility's June 2026 investor presentation and is forward-looking. The presentation states that the design, release timing, performance, certification, and production plans may change.^[25] Digit v5 had not been shown in the cited filings to have completed general third-party certification or entered the reported customer workcells by the research cutoff.

Control, simulation, and autonomy

Agility combines engineered dynamics with learned control. Current Digit development uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab to train whole-body controllers in simulated environments. An NVIDIA case study describes parallel reinforcement-learning episodes, cross-checks in the MuJoCo simulator, and transfer of the trained controller to warehouse and manufacturing deployments. NVIDIA and Agility describe this low-level controller as a software "motor cortex" for balance and coordinated motion.^[31]

This approach separates several layers of the system. High-level workflow software assigns a task; perception and navigation identify objects, obstacles, and destinations; whole-body control coordinates feet, torso, and arms; and hardware safety functions can stop the machine. Training in simulation reduces the amount of risky trial and error on physical robots, but it does not remove the need for site testing, hazard analysis, or validation on the deployed hardware.

Arc deployment software

Arc is Agility's cloud platform for configuring, operating, and monitoring Digit deployments. The company unveiled it at MODEX on March 11, 2024. Its initial functions included facility mapping, workflow definition, robot-status monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting of uptime, throughput, and mean time between incidents. It also exposed interfaces for warehouse management, warehouse execution, and manufacturing execution systems.^[14]

By March 2025, Agility said Arc could dispatch and coordinate autonomous mobile robots from MiR and Zebra Robotics. The same update listed charger support, workcell emergency-stop integration, webhooks, remote monitoring, and enterprise-system interfaces.^[18] These capabilities describe Agility's platform offering. Whether a function is enabled at a particular customer site depends on that site's integration and approved workflow.

Agility supplies Digit through both direct sales and service arrangements. The GXO agreement is explicitly structured as Robots-as-a-Service, with Digit hardware and Arc deployment software used together.^[15] Public sources do not provide a standard unit price or subscription rate that can be applied across customers, so estimates of a universal purchase price or hourly charge are not reliable specifications.

Manufacturing and facilities

RoboFab is Agility's 70,000-square-foot assembly facility in Salem, Oregon. The company announced it in September 2023 and described it as a factory built specifically for humanoid production. Its stated design capacity is more than 10,000 robots per year, with hundreds planned in the first year and more than 500 workers at full capacity.^[12] These are facility capacity and staffing plans, not evidence that Agility has produced 10,000 robots in any year.

The facility uses modular assembly cells for major robot subsystems rather than a conventional heavy-automation line. Locating manufacturing in Salem kept it near the company's Oregon engineering roots. The current company site identifies Salem as the headquarters and RoboFab location, Pittsburgh as an engineering, testing, validation, and skills-development office, and Fremont as its Bay Area software and capabilities center.^[1]

Agility opened the 60,000-square-foot Fremont facility on July 16, 2026. The company said it would use the site to train, test, and develop robot skills and planned to hire nearly 200 people across software, machine-learning, and field-operations roles.^[32] The hiring figure was a plan announced at opening, not a reported headcount.

Commercial deployments and customer programs

Agility's customer announcements cover tests, pilots, purchase intentions, and operating service contracts. Treating every announcement as an equivalent fleet deployment would overstate the public evidence.

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The 100,000-tote figure is more informative than a demonstration because it records repeated cycles in a live workflow. It remains a company-reported cumulative count, however, and Agility did not publish the underlying event log, uptime distribution, intervention rate, or independent audit with the announcement.^[19] Similar limits apply to deployment-hour and accuracy figures in investor materials.

Safety, standards, and certification

NRTL field evaluation

In November 2025, Agility announced that a Digit installation at an e-commerce fulfillment site had passed a field evaluation performed by an OSHA-recognized Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL). The company cited machinery and robot-safety standards including ANSI B11.0, ISO 12100, ISO 13849, ISO 10218, and ANSI/RIA R15.08.^[20]

The wording requires several qualifications. OSHA recognizes independent laboratories and the test standards within their scopes; OSHA does not itself test or certify Digit.^[29] Agility did not identify the laboratory or publish its field-evaluation report. The company also states that field evaluations are site-specific.^[20] The result therefore supports the evaluated installation and configuration. It is not evidence of unrestricted approval for every Digit, every workcell, or unguarded operation beside the public.

OSHA states that it has no robotics-specific workplace standard. Its robotics pages instead point employers to applicable general-industry requirements and voluntary consensus standards.^[28] Employers and system integrators still have to assess hazards from motion, falling, electrical equipment, stored energy, maintenance, interaction with other machines, and reasonably foreseeable misuse at each installation.

Developing standard for dynamically stable robots

Traditional industrial-robot standards do not fully address a legged machine that must continuously control its own balance. ISO began developing ISO 25785-1 for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots, including bipedal and quadrupedal machines. As of July 28, 2026, the ISO catalog listed the document as ISO/CD 25785-1, a committee draft under development, not a published International Standard.^[27]

This distinction matters because Agility's investor presentation described a "new ISO safety standard approved" while identifying ISO 25785-1.^[25] Committee approval to advance a draft is not final publication or product certification. Digit v5's proposed cooperative-safety design therefore remained a product plan against an evolving standards framework at the cutoff date.

Cooperative-safety program with NVIDIA

On June 22, 2026, NVIDIA announced Halos for Robotics and named Agility as the first company integrating parts of the system into a proprietary robot-safety design. The announced work combines NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos Core with Agility's safe-human-detection system. Agility also planned to participate in NVIDIA's accredited AI Systems Inspection Lab before seeking final third-party certification.^[26]

The announcement concerns development and certification readiness. It does not show that an unguarded Digit v5 deployment had already received certification. NVIDIA described planned evaluation against functional- and AI-safety standards including IEC 61508, ISO 13849, and ISO/IEC TR 5469.^[26]

In April 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology separately proposed a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots. The project covers locomotion, manipulation, coordinated movement, whole-body awareness, and limited reasoning tasks, and was still being developed with industry and research participants.^[30] A capability benchmark is distinct from a safety certification, but its unfinished status illustrates the continuing lack of common public measures for comparing humanoid performance.

Funding and proposed public listing

Agility has disclosed several funding milestones:

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Figures reported in 2025 media stories for an approximately $400 million Series C or a $1.75 billion pre-investment valuation were not confirmed in Agility's Series C announcement. They should not be presented as completed-round terms.

On June 24, 2026, Agility and Churchill Capital Corp XI entered a definitive business-combination agreement. The SEC filing and joint announcement described a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value and more than $620 million in expected gross proceeds, including approximately $200 million from a common-stock private investment in public equity.^[24] These are proposed transaction terms, not cash already received by Agility. The filing says closing depends on Churchill shareholder approval, SEC review of a Form S-4 registration statement, regulatory and exchange approvals, and other conditions.

Agility's investor presentation also reported more than $300 million of multi-year Digit v5 orders. Its footnote says the figure relates to 1,000 robots under three-year service contracts, is subject to contractual milestones, includes warrants that vest as robots are deployed, and is not current-period revenue.^[25] The order figure should therefore not be equated with recognized sales or completed deployments.

Leadership

Agility's official leadership pages and July 2026 appointment announcement list the following principal executives:

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Beer became chief financial officer on July 23, 2026. Hunter, who had held combined finance and operations responsibilities, continued as chief operating officer.^[1][33] Mikhail Jones is documented as a company co-founder and early software leader, but he is not listed among the principal executives on the current company page.^[2]

Evidence boundaries

Several kinds of evidence appear in public accounts of Agility, and they should not be merged into one claim of commercial maturity:

• A product demonstration shows that a robot completed a task under a particular setup. It does not establish uptime or economics in sustained operations.
• A pilot or test documents customer evaluation but not necessarily a paid production contract.
• A commercial agreement establishes a customer relationship; it does not prove the number of robots delivered unless the parties disclose that figure.
• Company-reported tote counts, deployment hours, accuracy, orders, and pipeline values are useful operating indicators, but the underlying records are not public in the cited sources.
• RoboFab's 10,000-unit figure is design capacity. It is not annual production.
• The NRTL announcement concerns a site-specific field evaluation. OSHA recognition applies to the laboratory, and the unpublished report prevents independent review of the exact scope.
• Digit v5 specifications, cooperative-safety capability, release timing, customer orders, and merger proceeds were forward-looking as of the cutoff.

Maintaining these distinctions permits a factual account of Agility's documented progress without converting customer, investor, or marketing statements into independent measurements.

See also

• Humanoid Robot
• Warehouse robot
• Machine Learning
• Physical AI
• Digital twin
• NVIDIA Halos

References

1. ^Company. Agility Robotics. Accessed July 28, 2026.
2. ^2024 Oregon State University Faculty Innovator Award. Oregon State University Advantage, 2024.
3. ^ATRIAS: Design and validation of a tether-free 3D-capable spring-mass bipedal robot. Christian Hubicki et al., *The International Journal of Robotics Research* 35(12), 1497-1521, 2016.
4. ^Learning Locomotion Skills for Cassie: Iterative Design and Sim-to-Real. Zhaoming Xie et al., Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning, PMLR 100, 317-329, 2020.
5. ^Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State makes history by learning to run, completing 5K. Oregon State University Newsroom, July 25, 2021.
6. ^Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State achieves Guinness World Record in 100 meters. Oregon State University Newsroom, September 27, 2022.
7. ^Meet Digit: The Newest Robot From Agility Robotics. Agility Robotics, February 19, 2019.
8. ^Agility Robotics and Ford Motor Company Announce Partnership. Agility Robotics, January 2020.
9. ^Agility Robotics Raises $20 Million. Agility Robotics, October 2020.
10. ^Agility Robotics Raises $150M Series B Led By DCVC and Playground Global. Agility Robotics, April 22, 2022.
11. ^Amazon announces new fulfillment center robots, Sequoia and Digit. Amazon, October 18, 2023.
12. ^Opening RoboFab: World's First Factory for Humanoid Robots. Agility Robotics, September 18, 2023.
13. ^Agility Robotics Launches Next Generation of Digit. Agility Robotics, March 20, 2023.
14. ^Agility Robotics Brings Operational Visibility to Deployment of Digit Fleets with the Launch of Agility Arc. Agility Robotics, March 11, 2024.
15. ^GXO Signs Industry-First Multi-Year Agreement with Agility Robotics. GXO Logistics, June 27, 2024.
16. ^Agility Robotics Appoints Peggy Johnson as Chief Executive Officer. Agility Robotics, March 4, 2024.
17. ^Agility Robotics Announces Strategic Investment and Agreement with Schaeffler Group. Agility Robotics, November 13, 2024.
18. ^Agility Robotics Announces New Innovations for Humanoid Robot Digit. Agility Robotics, March 31, 2025.
19. ^Digit Moves Over 100,000 Totes in Commercial Deployment. Agility Robotics, November 20, 2025.
20. ^Beyond the Hype. Agility Robotics, November 24, 2025.
21. ^Mercado Libre and Agility Robotics Announce Commercial Agreement to Deploy Humanoid Robots. Agility Robotics and Mercado Libre, December 10, 2025.
22. ^Agility Robotics Announces Commercial Agreement with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Agility Robotics and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, February 19, 2026.
23. ^Agility Gets a New Brand. Agility Robotics, March 5, 2026.
24. ^Churchill Capital Corp XI Form 8-K and transaction exhibits. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, June 24, 2026.
25. ^Agility and Churchill Capital Corp XI Investor Presentation. Exhibit 99.2 to Churchill Capital Corp XI Form 8-K, June 2026.
26. ^NVIDIA Announces Halos for Robotics. NVIDIA Newsroom, June 22, 2026.
27. ^ISO/CD 25785-1: Robotics, safety requirements for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots, Part 1. International Organization for Standardization. Status accessed July 28, 2026.
28. ^Robotics: Standards. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Accessed July 28, 2026.
29. ^OSHA's Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory Program: Frequently Asked Questions. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Accessed July 28, 2026.
30. ^Humanoid Robot Baseline Performance Benchmark. National Institute of Standards and Technology, created April 20, 2026; updated May 15, 2026.
31. ^Humanoid Robot Digit Powered by Whole-Body Control Foundation Model. NVIDIA case study. Accessed July 28, 2026.
32. ^Agility Opens New Fremont Facility to Accelerate Physical AI Development. Agility Robotics, July 16, 2026.
33. ^Agility Robotics Appoints Michael Beer as Chief Financial Officer. Agility Robotics, July 23, 2026.
34. ^Agility Robotics Powers the Future of Robotics with NVIDIA. Agility Robotics, September 10, 2025.