The evolution of Digit: Agility Robotics’ journey from Cassie to Digit 5

amazon — from left to right: Cassie and Digit through the years. | The company has grown from its roots in the Dynamic Robotics Lab at OSU, to having three offices across the country, over 400 employees, and a factory that can build up to 10,000 robots annually.

With the release of Digit 5, we’re looking back at how Agility’s technology has evolved over the years. The latest versions of Digit, Agility’s Co-Founder and Chief Robot Officer Jonathan Hurst told The Robot Report, are built around the realities that come with doing actual work in partners’ facilities. https://www.therobotreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/The-Evolution-of-Digit-3.mp4 Agility’s story starts with Cassie Before Agility built Digit, it created Cassie, a bipedal robot optimized to run fast. Hurst said Cassie represents the R&D phase of Agility. Cassie took its first steps in 2016. Cassie features ostrich-like legs, which will become a hallmark of Agility’s robots until Digit 5. Its bird-like features reflect the company’s priorities at the time. “The fact that we even got to a leg configuration that looks like a bird was entirely coincidental, but promising and encouraging,” Hurst said. “Ostriches can run 40 miles an hour, and keep going all day long, so we arrived at that configuration because we were trying to achieve that same goal.” While the company didn’t continue making additional iterations of Cassie, the robot did continue to break records. In 2022, Cassie ran 100 meters with no falls in 24.73 seconds at OSU’s Whyte Track and Field Center. The robot established a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meters by a bipedal robot. The early days of Digit In 2017, Agility released the first iteration of Digit. This made the company a very early entrant to the humanoid market, which now seems to grow more crowded every day. Hurst said the release of the first Digit marked the start of the company’s proof-of-concept era. The company said the first version of Digit was built for researchers.