Agility Robotics filled in two pieces of Digit 5 in October. On October 15 it named Nyobolt as its battery technology partner, saying the new pack delivers 90 minutes of runtime and charges in nine minutes. On October 22 it said NVIDIA IGX Thor modules will be the only onboard compute in the general-availability version of Digit 5. Both feed one sales argument: that Digit 5 can work almost around the clock.

The battery math

Agility says the new pack achieves a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio, up from 2:1 on the current Digit 4, and lets Digit 5 “work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour day.” The arithmetic holds if charging is the only pause. Ninety minutes of work for every nine minutes of charging is about 91 percent of the clock, or roughly 21.8 hours a day. On the same basis, Digit 4’s 2:1 ratio allows about 16.

“For our customers, Digit’s uptime is the business case.”

Daniel Diez, Agility chief business officer, in the Nyobolt announcement

That is the claim customers will test. The 20-hour figure describes how long the battery lets the robot work, not how much useful work it does. Agility’s own risk disclosure in the same release warns that Digit 5 “or its battery system may not achieve the expected performance, specifications or operating results in commercial environments.”

What the compute deal covers

The NVIDIA change consolidates the robot’s computers and extends a safety collaboration. Agility is integrating IGX Thor and more NVIDIA Halos models into its own human-detection safety system, and will take part in NVIDIA’s Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, which evaluates safety-related software, AI components and cybersecurity protections. Agility says that work comes “ahead of final third-party certification,” which is still to come.

Pras Velagapudi, Agility’s chief technology officer, framed the goal around operations: robots “need to perform useful work reliably and safely in our customers’ operations.”

What a fair shift test counts

Charging is one interruption among several. A misplaced tote, a blocked aisle or a failed grasp can stop work too, and a nine-minute charge saves little if a person then spends half an hour on a recovery. A useful trial would report successful moves per scheduled hour, with charging, waiting for upstream work and human interventions logged separately. It would run across several shifts with the site’s real tote mix, and keep failed attempts in the count.

Early customer access to Digit 5 is expected in the first half of 2027, with availability widening over the following six to nine months. Agility, which began trading on Nasdaq on November 5, says it has more than $300 million in committed multi-year Digit 5 orders, subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications. The first published shift data from early units will show how much of the 20-hour day is work.