Toyota is officially putting robots on the factory floor, and not just for show.
After a quiet year-long pilot project, Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm has hired seven humanoid robots to work inside its plant that builds RAV4 SUVs. The rollout comes under a robots-as-a-service agreement, marking one of the more serious real-world deployments of humanoid machines in auto manufacturing.
“After evaluating a number of robots, we are excited to deploy Digit to improve the team member experience and further increase operational efficiency in our manufacturing facilities,” Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada President Tim Hollander said in a statement.
The robot, called Digit, is built by Agility Robotics, a company spun out of Oregon State University in 2015. Digit is designed for industrial spaces without people nearby and often connects two automated production lines. At the Toyota plant, the robots will unload totes filled with auto parts from an automated warehouse tugger.
Seven robots may not look flashy compared to viral clips of metal machines doing backflips. Still, actually embedding humanoid robots into daily factory operations is rare. Integrating them into charging systems, maintenance schedules, and workflow software takes serious coordination.
“When the tech companies spend real time in the field understanding the task that needs to be operated, the real workflows that happens…that’s when we will see a huge uptick in adoption,” Ram Devarajulu, a VP at Cambridge Consultants, said at the Humanoids Summit in late 2025.
Agility already has Digit robots working with GXO, Schaeffler, and Amazon in logistics roles. The company also offers a cloud platform called Arc to manage fleets.
“Cost of deployment … can be more than the price of the robot by a lot,” Agility CTO Pras Velagapudi said last year. “AI tools let us decrease that cost of deployment, decrease the amount of time getting the robot configured, and getting it operating at a level of performance that they want.”
Toyota and Agility say this partnership could open the door to more use cases that shift repetitive physical tasks away from workers and toward machines, while engineers continue building next-generation robots that can safely operate around people.
