Jonathan Hurst
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Jonathan W. Hurst is an American roboticist who is a co-founder and Chief Robot Officer of Agility Robotics, the company behind the Digit warehouse humanoid robot, and a professor of robotics at Oregon State University (OSU). He is one of the most prominent researchers in dynamic legged locomotion, the study of how machines can walk and run with the energy efficiency and robustness seen in animals. His academic work on the spring-mass model of locomotion produced the experimental bipeds ATRIAS and Cassie, and that research line was spun out of OSU in 2015 to become Agility Robotics, today one of the best-funded startups in Oregon history. [1][3][4]
At Agility, Hurst originally served as chief technology officer and now carries the title Chief Robot Officer, with day-to-day CTO duties held by Pras Velagapudi. He remains the company's technical conscience on locomotion and robot design, while continuing to direct research and help build the robotics program at Oregon State. [2][3]
Hurst earned all three of his degrees at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He completed a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering, then stayed at CMU's Robotics Institute for a master of science and a doctorate, both in robotics. He received his Ph.D. in July 2008. His dissertation, "The Role and Implementation of Compliance in Legged Locomotion," was advised by Jessica Hodgins and laid out the idea that would define his career: that springs and mechanical compliance, rather than rigid precision, are central to efficient and stable walking and running. [1][17][18]
It was at Carnegie Mellon that Hurst met Damion Shelton, a fellow robotics Ph.D. student who would later co-found Agility Robotics with him. [3][20]
Hurst joined Oregon State University in 2008 as the institution's first officially hired robotics faculty member, recruited into the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering by Kagan Tumer, who had come to OSU from NASA's Ames Research Center. The college gave Hurst dedicated space, which he established and named the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. [3][19]
Over the following years Hurst helped grow what had been a tiny effort into one of the larger university robotics programs in the United States. Student interest expanded quickly: by his account, a robotics club grew from a handful of students to more than 200 within a year. Oregon State introduced master's and Ph.D. degrees in robotics in 2014, making it one of only a few American universities at the time to offer graduate degrees specifically in the field, and Hurst became a co-founder of the Oregon State University Robotics Institute. He now holds the rank of professor of robotics and a College of Engineering Dean's Professor appointment. [1][3][19]
His research focuses on the fundamental science and engineering of legged robot locomotion. The work spans analysis of biological data, simulation of theoretical models, and the design and construction of physical robots, increasingly combined with reinforcement learning and other robot learning methods for control. Hurst's honors include a 2012 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Innovators award, the 2014 College of Engineering Engelbrecht Young Faculty Award, and a 2018 Oregon State University Faculty Innovator Award. [1][4]
The intellectual core of Hurst's research is the spring-mass model, a deliberately simple abstraction in which the body is treated as a point mass bouncing on springy legs. In simulation this model reproduces nearly every walking and running gait observed in people and animals, which led Hurst to argue that the limiting factor in legged robotics is not motor power or computing speed but a basic understanding of how locomotion works. Compliance, the springiness that lets a leg yield on contact, allows a robot to handle uneven ground much the way a running bird absorbs an unexpected dip without its brain having to react. [4]
To test the theory in hardware, Hurst's lab built ATRIAS, a bipedal robot whose name is a backronym for "Assume The Robot Is A Sphere." Constructed between roughly 2013 and 2015 with support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ATRIAS used lightweight carbon-fiber legs in a four-bar linkage with fiberglass leaf springs to physically approximate the spring-mass model. When researchers compared the ground-reaction forces produced by ATRIAS against those of a walking human, the two profiles had nearly the same shape, a result widely cited as one of the most faithful hardware realizations of human-like gait dynamics at the time. ATRIAS could walk and run outdoors untethered and recover from disturbances such as thrown objects. The work coincided with a surge of public interest in legged machines around the DARPA Robotics Challenge of 2012 to 2015. [4]
ATRIAS was followed by Cassie, unveiled in February 2017 and named after the cassowary, a large flightless bird. Cassie kept the spring-mass principles but redesigned the legs with more motors and passive spring joints at the shin and ankle, added powered ankles so it could stand still, and dropped to about half ATRIAS's mass. Cassie had no upper body, just two articulated legs, and Agility Robotics sold copies of it to research groups around the world, where it became a popular platform for bipedal locomotion experiments. In 2021 an Oregon State team ran Cassie a full 5 kilometers outdoors on a single charge in about 53 minutes. On 11 May 2022, using a controller trained in simulation with reinforcement learning, Cassie set a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meters by a bipedal robot, covering the distance in 24.73 seconds from a standing start and returning to standing without falling. [5][6]
| Robot | Built | Form | Notable for |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATRIAS | c. 2013 to 2015 | Bipedal, point feet | Closely matched human ground-reaction forces; DARPA-funded test of the spring-mass model |
| Cassie | 2017 | Bipedal, legs only | Sold to research labs; 5 km run (2021); Guinness 100 m record of 24.73 s (2022) |
| Digit | 2019 onward | Full humanoid | Commercial logistics robot; first humanoid in a paid commercial deployment (2024) |
Agility Robotics was founded in 2015 as a spinout of Hurst's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State. The three co-founders were Hurst, Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones, an OSU graduate student who had been the lead developer of ATRIAS's control software. Shelton served as chief executive from 2015 to 2024 and is now co-founder and chairman of the board, while Jones works as a vice president in software. The company was initially based in Albany, Oregon, near the university. [3][20]
The startup grew from selling Cassie research platforms into building Digit, a commercial humanoid aimed at logistics and warehouse work. In April 2022 Agility raised a $150 million Series B round led by DCVC and Playground Global, with participation from Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund, Sony Innovation Fund, TDK Ventures, and others. By 2026, analysts estimated the company had raised more than $640 million in total and was valued at roughly $2.5 billion, according to Willamette Week, which noted that Oregon State University holds equity in the firm. Agility has not publicly confirmed a valuation figure. [3][9][10]
In September 2023 Agility opened RoboFab in Salem, Oregon, which it described as the world's first factory built specifically to manufacture humanoid robots. The roughly 70,000-square-foot plant was designed to produce hundreds of Digits in its first year and to scale toward a capacity of more than 10,000 robots annually, eventually employing several hundred workers. [7][8]
As the company moved from research to mass production, its leadership broadened. In March 2024 Agility appointed Peggy Johnson, a former chief executive of Magic Leap and longtime Microsoft business-development executive, as chief executive officer. The change let Shelton step back to the chairmanship and let Hurst concentrate on the technology rather than on running the business. [15][16]
Digit is the humanoid robot that has made Agility, and by extension Hurst, central to the wave of commercial interest in humanoid robots in the mid-2020s. It builds on Cassie's bird-like legs but adds a torso, arms, and a sensor head, and it is sized to operate in spaces built for people. Public specifications put Digit at about 1.75 meters tall and roughly 65 kilograms, able to walk near 5 kilometers per hour and to lift totes and boxes weighing up to about 16 kilograms. Agility first revealed Digit in 2019 and began selling early units in 2020, including to Ford for last-mile delivery research. The robot's purpose later narrowed to repetitive warehouse robot tasks such as moving and recycling empty totes. [4][14]
Digit became the first humanoid to reach paying commercial work. In October 2023 Amazon Robotics began testing Digit at its BFI1 research and fulfillment facility in Sumner, Washington, putting the robot on empty-tote handling; Amazon, an Agility investor through the 2022 round, characterized the trial as very early-stage. Then, on 5 June 2024, Agility announced that a small fleet of Digit robots had gone to work for the logistics provider GXO at a Spanx facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, under a robots-as-a-service contract. Agility called it the first formal commercial deployment of humanoid robots, and the company later reported that Digit had moved more than 100,000 totes at the site. [11][12][13]
Hurst has positioned Digit, and humanoids generally, as a tool for physically demanding labor rather than for the home. Reflecting on the field in early 2026, he cautioned that humanoids are not heading into people's houses any time soon because of the safety challenges involved, and he framed warehouses and factories as the natural first market. As of June 2026, Agility reported that a fifth-generation Digit was due later in the year, with Hurst continuing to split his time between the company and his professorship at Oregon State. Other firms pursuing the same logistics-and-factory humanoid market include Figure AI, Apptronik, Tesla Optimus, and Boston Dynamics, but Agility's Digit was the first to log paid hours of commercial work. [3][4][13]