Agility's Digit 5 claims 90-minute runtime on a 9-minute charge

A humanoid robot that spends a third of its day at a charger earns nothing during those hours. That is the arithmetic behind Agility Robotics’ latest machine: its previous model, Digit 4, ran on a ratio of 2:1, two hours of work for every hour of charging, which German tech site heise online calculates as roughly a third of the day lost on the charging station. Agility now says Digit 5 will reverse that picture, with a battery that delivers 90 minutes of runtime and charges in nine minutes.

The problem is an old one in humanoid robotics. Their power comes from batteries, which do not last long and have to be recharged or swapped again and again. Agility, founded in 2015 in Salem, Oregon, says Digit has already logged more than 65,000 real-world operations in commercial settings, so the constraint is not theoretical for its customers. Heise notes that one alternative exists: China’s UBTech swaps the battery of its Walker S2 robot automatically, a method that should be faster than recharging. Agility has not chosen that route.

The fix comes from Nyobolt, a Cambridge, U.K. company founded in 2019. It combines proprietary anode materials, a new cell design and integrated power electronics to obtain fast charging, high power density, lower weight and long lifecycles. Nyobolt raised $60 million in May 2026 at a valuation of $1 billion, with support from Symbotic. Its chief executive, Sai Shivareddy, says the battery was picked because Digit 5 needs more power from a smaller, lighter pack in environments where reliability is not optional.

What does this change in practice? For a warehouse or factory operator, Agility says Digit 5 will deliver more than 20 hours of productive work in a 24-hour day, which is more than two full shifts, and its chief business officer, Daniel Diez, presents uptime as the core of the business case. If that holds, the same robot would replace far more labour hours than its predecessor, and the economics of a fleet change with it. But these are the company’s claims: neither Agility nor Nyobolt has published the battery’s capacity or number of charge cycles, and no independent test has yet measured the figures in a live site.

The calendar is still long. Agility expects early access to Digit 5 with the Nyobolt battery to begin in the first half of 2027, with availability growing over the following six to nine months. Until then, the 20-hour day remains a target written in a press release, not a shift on a warehouse floor.