Toyota hires seven humanoid robots for its RAV4 factory

Sizzle reels of metal humanoids doing backflips look awesome online, but putting two-legged robots to work on an actual assembly line every single day is a completely different ballgame.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada announced that following a year-long pilot, it signed a deal for seven Digit humanoid robots from Agility Robotics. Starting this April, the bipedal fleet will report for duty at Toyota’s Woodstock, Ontario plant, which churns out RAV4 SUVs.

Toyota is bringing the bots on board through a robots-as-a-service model, meaning it is subscribing to the capability rather than buying the hardware outright.

Unloading totes on the RAV4 line

Digit’s day job isn't flashy. The seven humanoids will primarily unload totes full of auto parts from automated warehouse tuggers and shuttle them where needed, taking over repetitive, high-strain physical drudgery.

Spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, Agility designed Digit to bridge gaps between existing automated production lines. Toyota Canada President Tim Hollander said evaluating multiple designs led them to Digit to improve the team member experience and boost plant efficiency.

That said, you won't see human workers brushing shoulders with Digits just yet. Current heavy-lifting humanoids still lack the safety reliability to run autonomously side-by-side with people, so they operate in segregated spaces. Agility says a safer next-gen bot meant for direct human collaboration is in the works.

Getting out of the lab

Getting humanoid hardware to function in live factory operations is rare. Beyond walking and grabbing boxes, companies have to solve routine maintenance, charging choreography, and tight software integration.

Agility has been pushing harder than most to escape the lab. GXO was the first to commercially deploy Digit under the same RaaS model at a Spanx facility in Georgia, with Amazon and Schaeffler testing them too. To keep fleets in check, Agility provides its proprietary cloud management platform, Arc.

Agility’s CTO Pras Velagapudi pointed out last year that deployment costs often eclipse the price of the robot itself, making AI configuration tools vital to getting them up and running quickly. Meanwhile, rival Figure AI spent 10 months testing Figure 02 at a BMW plant, moving roughly 90,000 parts, alongside ongoing factory pilots from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apptronik.

Why it matters

Seven robots shuffling totes doesn’t look like a sci-fi revolution, but we think it marks a crucial transition for the robotics sector: shifting from proof-of-concept stunts to paid factory shifts.

The RaaS approach is clever here. By renting performance instead of committing heavy capital to depreciating, fast-evolving hardware, Toyota drastically reduces risk. If a bot breaks or needs maintenance, Agility handles it, all while feeding real operational telemetry back to its engineering teams.

Crucially, Agility is tackling the right kind of boring. Instead of pretending humanoids can handle nimble multi-part assembly right out of the gate, Digit is focused strictly on lugging heavy totes off tuggers—dull, ergonomically punishing work that plants struggle to staff.

The bottleneck remains the gap between human and robot workspaces. As long as these machines must be cordoned off, their utility remains capped. But when a manufacturing benchmark like Toyota signs a commercial check after a full year of tire-kicking, the pressure mounts on every rival still stuck showing demos.