Agility's Hurst: Digit 5 tops 120 kg and sits down when people come near

Agility Robotics co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst wrote in a first-person essay published by IEEE Spectrum on Oct 19 that Digit 5 weighs more than 120 kg and gave up running and jumping so it could lift 23 kg bins to 1.75 m shelves for up to 20 hours a day and work next to people.

Hurst said the robot stops, sets down its load, sits on the floor and cuts motor power when a person approaches, a behaviour Agility spent two years developing so that customers can run it without the safety cages Digit 4 needed.

The battery and cooling system fill about 75% of the torso, and the dock charges at 240 A and 48 V, which works out to about 11.5 kW by MEKAWIRE's arithmetic, for 90 minutes of work after a 9 minute charge.

Humanlike knees replace the earlier backward-bending legs because the old ankle struck the ground in deep squats, and Agility's 70,000 sq ft RoboFab in Salem, Oregon, can build more than 10,000 Digit 5 units a year, he wrote.

MEKAWIRE context: Agility reported more than $300 million in milestone-based Digit 5 orders when it unveiled the robot on Sept 15, named Nyobolt as the battery supplier on Oct 15, and goes to a Churchill Capital Corp XI shareholder vote on Nov 2 ahead of a Nasdaq listing as AGLT, as set out in the MEKAWIRE explainer on the company.