Okay, folks, get ready for some seriously cool robot news straight from the world of logistics! John Koetsier just dropped a fresh piece on Forbes about Agility Robotics, and it looks like their humanoid robot, Digit, is absolutely crushing it. GXO Logistics, who was actually Agility’s very first customer for these bipedal bots, is so impressed they’re doubling down – expanding Digit’s presence to two more massive U.S. warehouses in North Carolina and Tennessee.
This isn’t just a pilot program anymore; Digit has been hard at work at GXO’s Georgia facility since June 2024, zipping around and moving over 100,000 totes! That’s a huge milestone and a real testament to how these human-like robots are tackling repetitive material-handling tasks in e-commerce fulfillment. What’s even cooler is that GXO isn’t buying these robots outright; they’re essentially renting them through a “robots-as-a-service” (RaaS) model, with Agility managing the fleet via their cloud software. It’s like having a robot workforce on demand!
And it’s not just GXO taking notice. While GXO is all about logistics, Agility’s got other big names like Toyota, Schaeffler, and AGCO exploring Digit for factory work too. The future looks even brighter because GXO plans to upgrade these new deployments to the latest Digit 5 model as soon as it’s commercially available. This new version, unveiled just last month, is designed to work safely alongside humans without needing a cage, which is a massive leap forward. Plus, Agility itself is about to go public via a $2.5 billion SPAC deal, so clearly, big things are happening in the humanoid robot space!