Toyota contracts seven Agility robots to a Canadian factory

After a year-long pilot project, Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing subsidiary has contracted seven humanoid robots to work at a factory building the RAV4 SUV under a robotics-as-a-service deal.

“After evaluating a number of robots, we are excited to deploy Digit to improve the team member experience and increase operational efficiency in our manufacturing facilities,” Tim Hollander, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (TMMC), said in a statement.

The Digit robot in question was built by Agility Robotics, a company that spun out of Oregon State University in 2015. Digit is intended to work in industrial environments without humans nearby, often linking two robotic production lines. In this case, the robots will unload the load full of auto parts from an automated warehouse tug.

While seven robots doing tedious manual labor may seem like a small step compared to balls of metal humans doing backflips, deploying humanoid robots in real workplaces is rare and difficult. Demonstrating the capability in a lab is one thing, but integrating it into a company’s workflow — including maintenance and shipping — is not easy.

“When technology companies spend real time in the field to understand the mission they need to run, and the real workflow that happens… then we will see a significant increase in adoption,” Ram Devarajulu, a vice president at Cambridge Consultants, said at the Humanoids Summit in late 2025.

Agility is among the leaders in taking robots out of the lab, with Digits operating in similar capabilities to logistics providers such as GXO, Schaeffler and Amazon. The company has a proprietary cloud-based software package called Arc for users to manage their robot fleets, and says AI will be vital in reducing deployment costs.

“The cost of deployment…can be a lot more than the price of the robot,” Pras Velagapudi, Agility’s chief technology officer, said in an interview last year. “AI tools allow us to reduce the cost of deployment and reduce the amount of time it takes to configure the robot and get it up and running at the performance level they want.”

TMMC and Agility will use this engagement as an opportunity to pioneer other use cases that relieve workers of repetitive physical tasks and prioritize the most valuable work.

The company is also preparing a next-generation robot that will be safe to work alongside human workers; Current humanoid robots powerful enough to lift heavy loads are still considered too unreliable to operate autonomously around people.

Rival company Figure AI tested its Figure 02 robots at a BMW factory for 10 months last year, which the company said unloaded 90,000 parts. Other companies deploying humanoid robots in pilot programs include Apptronic, Unitree, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, 1X Technology, and Reflex Robotics.