Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics signed an agreement to jointly build a safety layer for the Digit 5 humanoid. The new piece is an Offboard Safety Bridge: a safety pendant and interfaces linking the robot to facility-wide safety systems. The agreement names no delivery date and no new certification.
Key takeaways
- A three-part architecture: safety pendant, on-robot communications, interfaces to external systems
- The pendant is a tablet in a custom holder with an emergency stop and enabling-device function
- Digit 5 already has onboard human detection, safety cues and safe motion control
- Scope of the deal: hardware, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance, deployment support
- No delivery date and no new safety certification
What is actually being built
The logic is straightforward. A stop signal can come not only from the robot but also from the environment the robot walks through between workstations.
The Offboard Safety Bridge has three layers:
The pendant includes an enabling device?Enabling device: A button held by the operator that gates the machine's motion. Releasing it, or squeezing too hard, stops the robot immediately. function, an element familiar from servicing industrial robots. It gates the machine's motion while an engineer is inside the work area.
Every layer we've added with FORT has made Digit's safety system more resilient, not just more redundant.
Pras Velagapudi, CTO at Agility Robotics.
The pendant is not teleoperation
It is easy to read the pendant as a step back toward manual control. Both companies say it is not.
Digit 5 does its normal work autonomously, and the pendant serves as a redundant manual override during setup, maintenance and emergencies.
Onboard, the robot already has safe human detection, intent cues and safe motion control. The new layer does not replace that; it extends it past the outline of the machine.
Who does what
FORT already supplied components for earlier Digit versions. The agreement moves that relationship from supply to joint development and covers hardware, solutions engineering, regulatory compliance and deployment support.
In parallel, Agility works with NVIDIA on an onboard safety architecture, while FORT takes part in the broader Halos ecosystem.
Why it matters
Machine safety standards assume a fenced cell or a predictable collaborative robot, not a machine walking between areas.
Moving safety off the robot is an attempt to fit humanoids into the infrastructure factories already run. Without that step, deployments stall at the pilot stage.
What's next
- The agreement contains no delivery date for the Offboard Safety Bridge and no new safety certification
- Agility has scheduled an Analyst & Investor Day for 6 October 2026
- Digit 5, unveiled on 15 September 2026, remains the target platform for this architecture
