<p>Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Agility Robotics after a year-long pilot involving three Digit humanoids. The next phase is described as a seven-robot deployment at Toyota’s Ontario operations, focused on loading and unloading totes from automated tugger or transport systems.</p><p>The sources do not publish cycle time, uptime, safety, quality, or payback results. That makes the story useful precisely because the proposed use case is narrow. A manufacturing team can validate one repetitive material-handling workflow inside the existing tugger, safety, IT, and line-control environment before discussing broader fleet expansion.</p><p>A Robots-as-a-Service structure can limit initial capital exposure while the use case is being proven. It does not remove the need to define acceptance criteria, exception handling, ergonomics, maintenance ownership, and quality controls.</p><p><strong>Operational takeaway:</strong> Qualify the task and its interfaces before qualifying the robot category. Require measured uptime, exception handling, safety evidence, and quality results before scaling.</p><p><strong>Sources:</strong> <a href="https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/agility-robotics-announces-commercial-agreement-with-toyota-motor-manufacturing-canada" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Agility Robotics, 19 February 2026</a>; <a href="https://www.automate.org/robotics/industry-insights/toyota-motor-manufacturing-canada-tmmc-thursday-confirmed-plans-to-deploy-agility-robotics-humanoids-at-an-assembly-plant-in-woodstock-ontario-roughly-80-miles-southwest-of-toronto-this-second-phase-follows-a-year-a-year-long-pilot-in-which-th" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A3, 19 February 2026</a>.</p>