Agility and FORT Robotics Announce Strategic Partnership to Advance Humanoid Robot Safety
Agility Robotics, a humanoid robotics and physical AI company, and FORT Robotics, a developer of safety infrastructure for physical AI, have signed a memorandum of understanding to further develop the safety infrastructure of Digit 5, Agility’s next-generation humanoid robot designed for safe collaboration with people at scale.
The partnership builds on a multi-year relationship between the companies that began with a custom hardware component and has evolved into an integrated three-part safety architecture. The system includes a safety pendant, on-robot communications and an off-robot interface that connects Digit with external safety systems. Jointly developed by FORT and Agility, the off-robot interface is designed to extend Agility’s cooperative safety approach beyond the robot while complementing Digit 5’s planned onboard safety features.
The agreement also establishes a broader framework for collaboration as Digit 5 moves into deployment and increasingly complex commercial environments. Areas of cooperation will include joint hardware development, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance and deployment support.
The companies aim to maintain a rigorous and transparent safety architecture as humanoid robots are deployed in environments where they work in close proximity to people, including warehouses, manufacturing facilities and logistics operations.
Advancing Safe Humanoid Deployment
As humanoid robots increasingly operate in environments designed for people, reliable safety systems are becoming essential both on the robots themselves and across their surrounding environments. Digit 5 will be Agility’s first humanoid robot designed for cooperatively safe work, supported by a safety architecture that covers human detection, safety cues and motion control.
By combining Digit’s onboard safety systems with FORT’s off-robot communication infrastructure, the companies aim to provide customers with a broader safety and operational framework as Digit takes on additional tasks across industrial facilities. Earlier generations of Digit have already accumulated more than 65,000 hours of operation and have been deployed at customer sites including Schaeffler, GXO and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada.
From Component Supplier to Safety Partner
Agility has integrated FORT’s technology into several previous versions of Digit and engaged the company earlier this year to develop the pendant sled, a custom holder for Digit’s tablet that incorporates emergency-stop and enabling-device functions. Like Digit 4, Digit 5 will be capable of autonomous operation during normal tasks. The pendant will allow operators to monitor the robot and provide customers with an independent manual safety override during setup, maintenance or unexpected situations. This adds another layer of protection while maintaining consistent safety coverage as deployments expand and complements Digit 5’s planned Safe Human Detection system.
"Every layer we've added with FORT has made Digit's safety system more resilient, not just more redundant," said Pras Velagapudi, CTO at Agility Robotics. "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."
A Broader Strategic Partnership
The formalized partnership is designed to expand FORT’s role beyond component supply into a closer operational relationship with Agility, supporting the growing scale and complexity of Digit 5 deployments.
"Agility has established itself as the leader in humanoid robotics by focusing on the only metrics that matter: safety and ROI," said Samuel Reeves, Founder and CEO of FORT Robotics. "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."
The expanded partnership is expected to support Agility’s ongoing deployments with enterprise customers while contributing to the safety architecture of Digit 5 and future generations of the platform as the robot operates across a broader range of environments and tasks.