| Date | 1 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|
| Region | U.S. & Allies |
The memorandum formalizes a multi-year safety relationship as Agility restates commercial hours and named-site deployments for Digit’s predecessors, while Digit 5 remains a planned next-generation platform.
IN BRIEF: On October 1, 2026, Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics said they signed a memorandum of understanding to advance the safety infrastructure of Digit 5, and Agility stated that Digit’s predecessors have logged more than 65,000 hours and been deployed at Schaeffler, GXO, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
RECORD:
Date: October 1, 2026
Beat: Robot Deployment Ledger
Jurisdiction: United States
Entity: Agility Robotics; FORT Robotics
Instrument / cite: Memorandum of understanding (no filing number stated for the MOU); release also references Churchill XI Form S-4
Source type: Company press release
Confidence: reported
Record ID: N/A
Source: Agility Robotics
Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics said on October 1, 2026, that they signed a memorandum of understanding to advance the safety infrastructure of Digit 5, Agility’s next-generation humanoid. The dateline is Salem, Oregon, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The release does two things at once. It formalizes a supplier relationship Agility already describes as multi-year, and it restates the operating record of Digit’s predecessors: more than 65,000 hours, with deployments at customer sites including Schaeffler, GXO, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
The instrument is an MOU, not a completed supply contract. Agility says the partnership will deepen an engagement that has grown from a single custom hardware component into an integrated, three-part safety architecture consisting of a safety pendant, on-robot communications, and off-robot interfaces connecting Digit with external safety systems. The off-robot interface, jointly developed by FORT and Agility, is designed to extend Agility’s cooperative-safety approach beyond the robot itself, enhancing the onboard safety architecture already planned for Digit 5. A broader operating framework is to cover joint hardware development, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance, and deployment support. The release presents those workstreams as the intended shape of the relationship, not as finished deliverables.
Digit 5 is characterized as forthcoming. The release calls the upcoming robot Agility’s first humanoid engineered for cooperatively safe work, built on a safety architecture spanning safe human detection, safety cues, and safe motion control. Combining that onboard approach with FORT’s offboard communication infrastructure is aimed, the companies say, at giving customers a more complete safety and efficiency envelope as Digit takes on new tasks across a facility. The hour count and the three customer names attach to predecessors, not to Digit 5. Agility’s company description repeats the figure — more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation — and calls Digit the first multi-purpose, human-centric robot that is Made for Work and commercially deployed today.
The hardware already described as in hand is narrower than the strategic language. Agility says it has embedded FORT’s technology in several past versions of Digit and engaged FORT earlier this year to deliver the pendant sled, a custom-built holder for Digit’s tablet that integrates emergency stop and enabling-device functionality. Like Digit 4, Digit 5 will be capable of operating autonomously during normal work. The pendant is to monitor the robot and give the customer a redundant manual override during setup, maintenance, or an unexpected situation, and to complement Digit 5’s anticipated onboard Safe Human Detection system. That last phrase leaves Safe Human Detection as anticipated, not as a system this release says has been certified or fielded.
Pras Velagapudi, CTO at Agility Robotics, said: “Every layer we’ve added with FORT has made Digit’s safety system more resilient, not just more redundant.” He added: “The Offboard Safety Bridge is a good example of what this partnership is really about: building safety infrastructure that works whether the input is coming from onboard the robot, or from the environment around it, so the robot can be trusted to operate near people in a more diverse set of environments.” Samuel Reeves, Founder and CEO of FORT Robotics, said: “Agility has established itself as the leader in humanoid robotics by focusing on the only metrics that matter: safety and ROI.” He continued: “Physical AI only earns trust when the safety layer around it is as capable and as accountable as the robot itself. Formalizing this as a strategic partnership reflects how central that architecture has become to getting humanoid robots to work safely in close proximity with people.”
For an enterprise buyer, the usable record in this document is the predecessor ledger. Schaeffler, GXO, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada are named as sites where predecessors have been deployed. No unit counts, start dates, task lists, or incident figures appear. The companies expect the expanded partnership to support Agility’s ongoing deployments with enterprise customers and to inform the safety architecture of Digit 5 and future generations as the robot takes on a wider range of environments and tasks, including warehouses, manufacturing, and logistics, and work in close proximity to people.
FORT Robotics, which describes itself as the Trust Layer for Physical AI and dates its founding to 2018, says it is backed by Tiger Global, Mark Cuban Companies, Prologis Ventures, and Five Eleven Partners, and that it is pursuing a Nasdaq listing through its business combination with Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp (Nasdaq: NTWO). The same release states that a proposed Agility transaction will be submitted to shareholders of Churchill XI, and that Churchill XI has filed a registration statement on Form S-4 with the Securities and Exchange Commission that includes a preliminary proxy statement/prospectus for that combination and the securities to be issued to Agility stockholders. Those capital-markets passages are company disclosures in the release. This document does not report that either combination has closed.
Agility Robotics is headquartered in Salem, Oregon, with offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Fremont, California. Media contacts listed are Michael Oldenburg for Agility and Tim Smith for FORT Robotics.
WHY IT MATTERS: The MOU converts a component relationship into a named safety partnership at the moment Agility is asking buyers to treat predecessor hours — more than 65,000, at Schaeffler, GXO, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada — as the evidence base for a Digit 5 platform the release still describes as planned. For plant operators and investors, the distinction that matters is between a restated operating ledger and a three-part architecture that has not yet been fielded under the Digit 5 design.