Oregon facility builds and tests humanlike robot ‘Digit’

In a Salem factory on a Tuesday afternoon, Digit the robot is being tested.

The humanlike robot uses its two legs to walk up to a storage bin. Digit’s two arms reach for the bin, and its clawlike hands grip the sides. The robot gracefully lifts the storage box up so it’s level with its torso.

Digit turns so that its head — which looks similar to a small projector with a white screen — faces the storage bin’s intended location.

As part of its testing to work in warehouses for companies like Amazon, the robot then slowly uses its two legs with flat, rectangular feet, to walk the bin to its new spot. It bends down slightly, with knees moving the opposite direction from a real human’s, and sets down the bin before returning to pick up another box.

And, Digit blinks.

“When a robot is standing still, it can balance much better than a person does,” Jonathan Hurst, Agility Robotics co-founder and Oregon State University robotics professor, explained.

“It doesn’t sway or move or anything, and a lot of times people will unconsciously register it as an inanimate object, like a chair or a table. Then when it moves, it’s a big surprise.”

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Hurst has found that in general, people don’t like that. But when the robot makes small movements — or when the screen acting as Digit’s face illuminates what looks like two blinking eyes — it can help people feel more comfortable working alongside it, Hurst said.

“They are more aware of it, and more aware that it may move,” Hurst said. “They like it better. And as an opinion, not a fact, it’s safer. It’s not a certified safety thing, but in my opinion it makes it safer.”

Agility Robotics has created one of the world’s first humanlike robots capable of working in spaces designed for people.

Digit was born from research at Oregon State University that was partially funded with federal grants from the National Science Foundation. As the Trump administration slashes federal funding for research at universities, Digit is the kind of invention that could be hard to do in the future.

“This kind of research, it was over $10 million of funding for the first 10 years or so to develop,” Hurst said.

That decade has come and gone. Agility Robotics officially launched in 2015, and it recently opened up a 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem where Digit robots are constructed, tested, programmed and refined.

Hurst joined OSU nearly 15 years ago with the goal of creating two things: a robust robotics program at the Corvallis-based university, and a company capable of building humanlike robots.

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So far, Hurst has achieved both goals. First, OSU opened its inaugural robotics lab. Then, Agility Robotics launched in 2015. In 2022, the company attracted more than $150 million from investors, including from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and venture capital firms DCVC and Playground.

All of that allowed Agility to open its Salem facility, where it employs around 120 electrical engineers, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, roboticists and technicians. The space is capable of producing up to 10,000 robots a year.

“We all want robots to help us all over the place and do the things we’d rather not do,” Hurst said. “That’s what automation is for, but it’s going to be a long road to get there because they’re not going to go in the home until you can prove that a robot is not going to fall on a baby or pour hot tea in your lap or something like that.”

Hurst said challenges could be ahead, however. Even though a lot of Agility’s parts are sourced domestically and few come from China, tariffs on imported parts could make the cost of doing business go up.

But Hurst’s biggest concern is cuts to federal funding for scientific research. It may not directly affect his company, but he’s worried about the loss of innovation and opportunities to train tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.

In April, the Trump administration canceled thousands of financial awards through the NSF. Earlier this month, the administration proposed cutting the foundation’s budget by more than half to around $4.3 billion.

Oregon State University president Jayathi Murthy, who recently visited Agility Robotics herself, said the company is a testament to how research starts in a lab and ends up in the real world.

Funding from the federal government is needed to help fuel that research, she said, because government funders are not worried about making a profit.

“You take chances, you figure the science out — some things work, some things don’t,” Murthy, an engineer by training, said. “You have a lot of failure before you can have any kind of success. And I do think that universities — because they’re not businesses — are able to make those kinds of investments and take those kinds of risks.”