Toyota contracts seven Agility humanoid robots for Canadian factory

Toyota Canada hires seven humanoid robots

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a contract for seven humanoid robots to work in a plant building RAV4 SUVs. The deal follows a year-long pilot project and is structured as a robots-as-a-service agreement.

The robots, named Digit, are built by Oregon-based Agility Robotics. They will be tasked with unloading totes full of auto parts from an automated warehouse tugger.

A rare real-world deployment

While the job is simple, the deployment is significant. Getting humanoid robots out of lab demonstrations and into actual, integrated workflows is a major hurdle for the industry.

"When the tech companies spend real time in the field understanding the task... that's when we will see a huge uptick in adoption," said Ram Devarajulu, a VP at Cambridge Consultants, at a recent industry summit.

Agility is a leader in this effort. Its Digits are already working for logistics firms like GXO, Schaeffler, and Amazon.

The challenge is deployment, not hardware

The biggest barrier to adoption isn't just the robot's price tag. It's the cost and complexity of getting it to work reliably in a specific environment.

"Cost of deployment can be more than the price of the robot by a lot," Agility CTO Pras Velagapudi said last year. The company is betting on AI and its cloud software, called Arc, to streamline this process and manage robot fleets.

TMMC and Agility plan to use this contract to explore more use cases, aiming to shift human workers away from repetitive physical tasks.

The crowded field of humanoid robots

Agility is not alone in pushing for industrial applications. The field is becoming increasingly competitive with several major players running pilot programs.

• Figure AI tested its Figure 02 robot in a BMW factory for 10 months last year.
• Other companies with active pilots or development include Apptronic, Unitree, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, 1X Technology, and Reflex Robotics.

Next-generation robots will work alongside people

A key limitation of current humanoid robots is safety. Models strong enough to lift heavy loads are not yet considered reliable enough to operate autonomously near human workers.

Agility Robotics is developing a next-generation robot designed specifically to be safe for collaborative work. This would represent a major step forward, allowing robots to move from isolated tasks into shared spaces on the factory floor.