Agility Robotics just unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid robot built with safety features that let it work alongside humans without needing isolation barriers or physical separation. The robot can detect people nearby and respond in different ways—it might move out of the way, freeze in place, or squat down if someone gets too close. This matters because it removes a major obstacle to deploying robots in real warehouses and factories, where you can't always section off robot-only zones. The company plans to ship early units to customers in the first half of 2027, with broader availability by year's end. Agility is ramping up production at its Salem, Oregon facility to handle demand. This timeline matters because Agility already has real-world credibility: they deployed Digit robots at a GXO warehouse in Atlanta in 2024 and have since logged over 65,000 hours of work across North America. Clients include GXO, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Schaeffler—not startups betting on vaporware, but established companies actually using these robots. The safety system isn't just one trick. Pras Velagapudi, Agility's CTO, explained that Digit 5 uses a "complex safe motion system" that picks different responses based on what kind of human presence it detects. This flexibility is the real engineering challenge—the robot needs to handle unpredictable human behavior in messy real environments, not just follow a script. That's why Agility has been talking about safety as a core constraint from the start, even while pushing hard to commercialize the technology faster than competitors.