Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a robots-as-a-service deal to deploy seven humanoid robots at a plant that builds RAV4 SUVs, moving the Digit platform from a year-long pilot into daily operations focused on parts handling and workflow support.
From Pilot Project To Production Floor
The agreement follows a year-long trial and centers on Digit, a humanoid robot built by Agility Robotics, a company spun out of Oregon State University in 2015. Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm said the robots will work in industrial areas without humans nearby and will often bridge two automated production lines.
At the RAV4 facility, the robots will unload totes filled with auto parts from an automated warehouse tugger. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada President Tim Hollander said in a statement that the company chose Digit after evaluating several robots and plans to use the deployment to improve team member experience and increase operational efficiency.
Why Real-World Deployment Is Difficult
While seven robots may appear modest compared with demonstrations of advanced humanoid movement, placing these systems into real factories remains uncommon and complex. Proving a capability in a lab differs from integrating it into daily operations, which includes maintenance, charging, and fitting the machines into existing workflows.
Ram Devarajulu, a vice president at Cambridge Consultants, said at the Humanoids Summit in late 2025 that adoption increases when technology companies spend time in the field understanding the tasks and workflows that need to be supported.
Agility’s Platform And The Cost Of Rollouts
Agility Robotics is among the companies pushing to move humanoid robots beyond testing environments. Digits already operate in similar roles for logistics providers such as GXO, Schaeffler, and Amazon. The company offers a cloud-based fleet management system called Arc and has said AI tools are central to lowering deployment costs.
Pras Velagapudi, Agility’s chief technology officer, said in an interview last year that the cost of deployment can exceed the price of the robot itself. He said AI tools help reduce setup time and speed up the process of getting a robot configured and operating at the level customers want.
Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Agility said they plan to use the current engagement to develop additional use cases that remove repetitive physical tasks from human workers and shift people toward more valuable work.
Safety And The Next Generation Of Robots
Agility is also preparing a next-generation robot designed to operate safely alongside human workers. Current humanoid robots that can lift heavy loads remain too unreliable to run autonomously around people, which limits where they can be used inside factories.
A Crowded Field Of Industrial Trials
Other companies are testing similar systems. Figure AI said its Figure 02 robots operated in a BMW factory for 10 months last year and unloaded 90,000 parts. Additional firms running humanoid pilots include Apptronic, Unitree, Tesla, Boston Dynamics, 1X Technology, and Reflex Robotics.
Featured image credits: rawpixel.com
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