The bipedal robot independently handled and transported items during a series of trials conducted at the IROS 2026 conference this month. Agility Robotics deployed its Digit robot to perform end-to-end whole body mobile manipulation in a previously unseen location not included in its training data, achieving a success rate of 80% to 90% while operating for roughly 12 hours despite crowds and harsh lighting.
The system utilized a manipulation policy trained on approximately 500 real-world teleoperated demonstrations and a whole-body controller developed in simulation. The project was led by researchers Ishita Gupta, Stanley Premkumar, and Jonah Siekmann under Chris Paxton, who stated that the demo is currently a research effort and not yet running in production.
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