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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

• dpcx 1y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but everything about this announcement feels very I, Robot... and not in a good way. > allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement Ugh. Edit: Yes, I meant I, Robot the film. U.S. Robotics and the like.
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    Robotics AI has a massive "training data bottleneck" issue. If you aren't using your deployed robot fleet to get more real world training data, you're just stupid.
  • causal 1y ago
    Yeah tech companies have a weird fixation on using dystopian literature as their entire branding playbook
    • browningstreet 1y ago
      Dystopian literature was training data and road-mapping.
    • psunavy03 1y ago
      https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
    • renewiltord 1y ago
      It's just that sci fi authors try to see into the future and have to write things interesting. There's two ways: - novel idea or technology - counterintuitive effect of technology I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field. The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them. This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
      • causal 1y ago
        I mean, you're definitely assuming positive outcomes here too. Far too early to tell how most tech will end up being used.
        • renewiltord 1y ago
          No, I'm not. I'm simply saying that whether the outcomes are going to be positive or negative, it will always seem like the Torment Nexus. Therefore, something sounding like the Torment Nexus does not provide information towards a prediction that it will be the Torment Nexus. People warned about the dangers of social media (or with modern LLMs + Diffusion Models and scamming) and that's kinda come true, but people also warned about the dangers of IVF and that's just been good. So what happens is that people always warn about the dangers. Humans are loss-averse so they find it easy to do that. It is unsurprising that every new tech seems like dystopian literature because there's a lot of dystopian literature focused on the near future and we're good at coming up with negative hypotheses. There is no significance in it.
  • marcellus23 1y ago
    Do you mean "I, Robot", not iRobot the vacuum company? And if so, I'm guessing you're referring to the movie with Will Smith? The original book of short stories isn't really dystopian, it's more just an interesting exploration of Asimov's concept of how robots would work.
  • nerdjon 1y ago
    Nearly everything about this screams I, Robot and it is kinda wild that they went that route with this article. The package delivery and the quick intro and head turning in particular. I agree on the data part. I love the potential idea of a humanoid robot at home to take care of chores, but now it seems like the potential for it not being constantly connected and collecting data is gone out the window. I find it quite strange that they are openly bragging about how much data it will be gathering and uploading from within your home. That feels like the part you would not say out loud.
  • genpfault 1y ago
    > U.S. Robotics and the like. The modem[1] folks? :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  What does your life around your house look like when you can shamelessly leave a mess everywhere? It almost makes the uncomfortable with the amount of laziness it enables. At least with a human maid you still feel shame leaving a mess, but a robot?
  • ACCount37 1y ago
    If you believe that thankless, pointless busywork is a virtue, then surely, Sisyphus must be the most virtuous man of them all.
    • the_other 1y ago
      Cleaning is pointless?
      • simultsop 1y ago
        If there's an automated system to do it for you conveniently, it becomes.
      • browningstreet 1y ago
        All the mindfulness threads on this site would like a word.
      • Citizen_Lame 1y ago
        It is, but we want our habitat to be clean. If robots can fight entropy for us, all the better.
    • 4b11b4 1y ago
      I have come to think cleaning is actually one of the most virtuous acts for a human. Even more so as we live in societies which produce waste as a fundamental mode of operation
    • Blumplumi 1y ago
      Funny enough, i'm 38 now and often enough thankless and 'pointless' busywork sometimes feels like a virtue. But only for me because I have the feeling i lived out my normal environment and i'm not rich enough yet to expand so I can become busy again in a more meaningful way. Specifically having a big house/workshop to do things in my future workshop.
• thund 1y ago
  4 of them please, going to spend every night playing poker on a real green!
• rvz 1y ago
  > "Continuing our vision for a fully autonomous, wire-free system" Alongside the full replacement of jobs and with autonomous robots, This is the exact definition of "AGI".
• ACCount37 1y ago
  Building the robot itself is hard enough - but it was never the hardest part. The thing to watch out for is: deployments. How many units are they pushing and to who. What kind of tasks can those robots accomplish well enough to warrant actually using them. How hard is it to adapt those robots to deployments. How that changes over time. The hardest problem of creating a universal robot is, and always has been, AI. If Figure can deliver sharp, highly adaptive, easy to use AI? High generalization, good performance on a diverse range of tasks and in many environments out of the box? Then they have a killer product. And a proxy to track that is reports of how many robots they deploy and to who. If they start shipping to small companies and deploying to high uncertainty spatially complex fields like construction or maintenance? If you start seeing robots unloading trucks and restocking shelves at a small town Walmart, unannounced? Big.
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    I think the glossy 7min trailer has it about right: The first realistic deployments will be champagne holders at parties and robots at hotel receptions. Novelty toys for the wealthy. Commoditization and Walmart-level deployments at scale are still a few gens off.
    • imtringued 1y ago
      Robot receptionists are a pretty good idea if it wasn't for the fact that their head design is pretty ugly.
    • ACCount37 1y ago
      I'm willing to believe that. But we could do those "novelty deployments" with 80s tech - and we did. See: tech expos back then. The key difference between now and then isn't smaller actuators, cheaper sensors or denser power electronics. It's the AI breakthroughs. Doesn't need to be "at scale". Scale is a useful proxy though. But if you see two robots deployed to your average Walmart, and doing a good enough job there to cut the staff in half? Doesn't matter that it's just two robots at a few Walmarts. Making more robots isn't that hard. The scale would inevitably follow.
    • 1y ago
• Teever 1y ago
  To me one of the best metrics for capability and design of these kinds of machines is the extent in which their manufacturer makes use of them in their manufacturing process. That tells me that the design is amenable to aftermarket service and maintenance and that the machines are capable of participating in relatively sophisticated manufacturing processes. A graph with one line representing the number of hours of physical labour by humans per unit produced with another line representing number of hours of physical 'labour' by these robots per unit produced would be interesting to look at. The intersection point between those two lines and the point where human input drops to zero are key points in humanity.
  • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
    Yeah, that's a very good metric to look for. In the software space, one of the coolest things and a clear signal that "AI coding" is here was watching Aider's graph of "amount of code aider wrote itself in each PR" and seeing that number go up. On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok. ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale. I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.
• modeless 1y ago
  > Charging coils in the robot’s feet allow it to simply step onto a wireless stand and charge at 2 kW. This is silly. Wireless charging is inefficient and costly compared to cables but we use it for the convenience of humans, to avoid the annoyance of having to plug something in repeatedly. Obviously a humanoid robot should simply plug in its own cable! No human need be inconvenienced. Wireless charging has no benefit here at all. > Each fingertip sensor can detect forces as small as three grams of pressure - sensitive enough to register the weight of a paperclip resting on your finger Three grams would be a very heavy paperclip. I have seen several types of touch sensor and while the technology is impressive I don't think any of them are durable enough for real use. Even human skin doesn't rely on durability alone. Healing is critical. But healing is infeasible for robots so instead we need to design repairable, replaceable, disposable, ideally recyclable parts, especially for the fingers that touch everything. This hand looks monolithic and not repairable. All that said, I'm looking forward to seeing if their claims about cost and manufacturing volume pan out. Those are the things that matter the most right now, along with reliability. We need large numbers of robots operating continuously in the world to collect the data that will enable us to train robot AI. Right now there's basically only one or two companies with scaled humanoid production (for a very loose definition of "scaled") and they are in China. I'm rooting for anyone who can manufacture robots outside of China.
  • achierius 1y ago
    The clear implication is that they cannot, in fact, handle plugging themselves in. Take from that what you will
  • ihumanable 1y ago
    I'm surprised it doesn't just have physical connection to the little stand it's sitting on. 30 years ago we figured out how to contact charge cordless phones with metal pads and prongs.
• gmuslera 1y ago
  Instead of Rick telling a conscious robot that its mission is to spread the butter, we now have robots with advanced AIs doing the laundry and the dishes. Reality follows fiction.
• websiteapi 1y ago
  I don't understand why this even has to charge at all. It makes sense for multiple reasons to give it 3 batteries that say have 1/3 of the capacity, and make at least 1, if not 2 or 3 capable of charging independently on a station. Then the robot would just go to its station and swap its own batteries. Why even have wireless charging at all? Or even a cable? Or even have it "charge"? Battery swapping seems to make way more sense here. Am I missing something? Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation and can order its own replacement batteries, take them out of the box, and ship the old ones to a recycling facility... More bonus points if the charging station is actually outside under a 1KW solar array pergola thing, that way you don't even have to pay for the electricity either. Don't worry, the robot will lock the door when it goes out to grab its batteries. It'll also bring in the whole setup if the weather isn't great.
  • 4b11b4 1y ago
    Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them. But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in... Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger
    • pants2 1y ago
      I believe Elon has said before re:Tesla factory that plugging in cords is one of the hardest things to automate.
      • ACCount37 1y ago
        I'd appreciate a link. But "we don't trust our robot to be able to locate a power outlet and plug its own charging cord in there" sure is a low confidence play. There are practical advantages to being able to charge wirelessly, sure. But if they're doing that because of AI limitations? Bad sign.
• natemcintosh 1y ago
  I would love to have something like this for all the chores around my house. But I also have serious reservations about the increased level insight into my private home life this could provide to the manufacturer. Look at cases like the ring camera security violations [1]. A moving robot could be an order of magnitude more invasive of your privacy. If I were to purchase this, I would want serious privacy guarantees. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-says-ring-employees-illegally-surveilled-customers-failed-stop-hackers-taking-control-users https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
  • ge96 1y ago
    My fear is it's remotely hacked/operated and it kills me in my sleep
    • sroussey 1y ago
      Or a Tesla remotely operated to run over your children.
      • ge96 1y ago
        I suppose a car could gain enough speed and drive through a house that would be a sight to see on camera, leaves your garage then comes back at 80mph A more simpler/realistic scenario is it happens while driving
        • dylan604 1y ago
          It'd be better if it comes back at 88mph
  • dylan604 1y ago
    You mean like the Roomba robots enabled with cameras that have sent embarrassing images back to the mothership where employees have access to the footage and then share on their socials? No, not could be. They already are. I never did follow the home security system with a drone that would fly around your home with a camera. Not sure if that died a glorious death because it was just dumb or what happened to it. I was just waiting to hear about it leaking all sorts of things too. https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/01/a-private-moment-caught-by-a-roomba-ended-up-on-facebook-lock-and-code-s04e03 https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/01/a-private-...
• causal 1y ago
  If this is real it would be so easy to create a hype video that shows one of these things out in the wild handling unscripted situations with adversarial actors. But the fact we always see the same basic tasks in these videos makes me deeply suspicious that this is demoware. Bring in the Boston Robotics hockey stick guy for starters
  • the_gipsy 1y ago
    Yea, the selected short clips are extremely suspicious.
    • ihumanable 1y ago
      They've got an hour long video of it sorting packages if you want a longer clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U They've shown the "putting dishes in the dishwasher" bit before, it seems to be getting better, but I imagine it still has a high failure rate. I wonder if this company started off or has some founder that's really interested in the "handling deformable stuff" space. They really seem keen to promote that it can do tasks like folding a shirt or working with soft packages. Definitely seems like a carefully curated video, but the longer videos make me think that either they are running a scam or they have some of this stuff working well enough.
      • robots0only 1y ago
        Here you can see another much simpler robot folding clothes for far longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeBIR0jVvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeBIR0jVvU (there are more videos from other companies as well) To answer your question -- folding clothes is easy, because clothes easily deform, do not break, fall smoothly when you drop them and most importantly are easily resettable task. Just through the well folded cloth up and voila start again.
        • imtringued 1y ago
          Actually, folding clothes is a challenging dexterity task. However, it's a trivial mechanical engineering task, which is why it is so popular with underpowered robot arms.
• sksksk 1y ago
  The use cases in their videos are interesting, I suppose the world we live in is build for humans, so it makes sense to build a robot that is human shaped. So we don't need to buy new washing machines and redesign our house to get a robot maid. The hotel reception use case seems ridiculous though, if you get rid of a human receptionist, you lose the human element of the check in process, which people like. If you're getting rid of the human and losing all the benefits of that, then just replace it with a kiosk (or mobile check in), which will do a far better job than a robot.
  • Blumplumi 1y ago
    Human touch for reception? I mean standing there for 10 minutes and giving them my passport to give me a plastic card with a digital code has very little to do with human touch. I want that human touch at a bar perhaps but not at a reception. If your critisism is only about the reception part: There has to be a transition part and a 'let a human do it for a bit' or 'here is a complicated case please robot move aside i'm here'.
  • imglorp 1y ago
    Human shaped robots can type on keyboards and read screens! /s
  • indrora 1y ago
    A few years ago, I was in Vegas for an event. All factors of "it was Vegas" aside, one of the things that stood out to me was that the hotels have moved rapidly to rapid checkin/checkout systems where you punch in your confirmation code or name/dob and present a photo ID of some kind (passports can just be slapped against the reader) and it asks a few questions ("do you need late checkout", etc), directs you to the exact place your room is (and prints it, which was nice) and tells you where the bellhop station is if there's more than a little while before your room is ready and it can't dispense your cards. All told, four of these stations had roughly 90% the throughput of the four real humans, but they "moved faster" because it didn't feel like queuing for a human, more... "waiting for a toilet"? Kiosk based stuff is great until it fails. Spend an hour in the checkin area of a major airport and you'll see any number of interesting failure modes. As for the washing machine bit: Why not push for more standards usage in home automation? We have Thread, which is really cool, and which is driving the home automation future that we're slowly getting. Once it's loaded, a homebot should't have to check the thing manually, it should get information about when, what, and how and be able to have "eyes in the back of its head" so to speak.
• spagoop 1y ago
  As my parents get older, I'm starting to understand the real value that robots / autonomous driving has for addressing core accessibility issues. I have no idea about the maturity of this company in particular, but it's interesting that glossy robotics startups never lean in on that as a core user base.
  • Blumplumi 1y ago
    Check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqP8IXA-UXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqP8IXA-UXs it shows how critical lifting with weights is for old people. I think we have A LOT of old people in precare situations because they are not aware of the possible difference this can make.
  • jansan 1y ago
    It's because they are not ready for real life applications (yet). Currently makers of humanoid robots have to ride the hype train, and this works better with addressing the desire of owning a bot that will make your life more luxurious.
• 1121redblackgo 1y ago
  It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses. Along with fusion, I think robots in the home will be the defining technology of our generation. It's been talked about and fictionalized forever, and within my lifetime I expect the economics on it to finally break through. Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
  • zingababba 1y ago
    I've skipped all the other past smart home trends, I think I'll skip this one too. I'll just do the dishes and laundry myself like I always have no biggie.
    • esafak 1y ago
      You wouldn't want a hand if you became infirm? In richer countries, human helpers are expensive.
      • recursive 1y ago
        Not if it's anything like any of the other home automation stuff I've seen. Some people treat configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. I have no interest in doing it recreationally.
      • ileonichwiesz 1y ago
        Helpers may be expensive, but space is at a premium too. Imagine this thing trying to navigate a cramped studio apartment.
  • mhitza 1y ago
    Can't wait to read the headline when one of them gets hacked and turned into murderous robots.
    • madeofpalk 1y ago
      I did not murder him!
• iamkoch 1y ago
  The site uses the word Helix so frequently that I began to feel stupid for having no idea what it means. Helix is used in so many different linguistic settings that it's not clear what it is.
  • Gys 1y ago
    ‘Helix, our AI system, is a generalist humanoid Vision-Language-Action model that learns and improves over time as it acquires new skills.’ Aha, now its clear ;)
  • modeless 1y ago
    It's the marketing name for their in house AI model.
  • marcellus23 1y ago
    It's explained in the first bullet point, even before the fold: > Helix: Figure 03 features a completely redesigned sensory suite and hand system which is purpose-built to enable Helix - Figure's proprietary vision-language-action AI.
• zingababba 1y ago
  https://youtu.be/zBCu8HmXoRo https://youtu.be/zBCu8HmXoRo will robot abuse become a new fetish?
• stravant 1y ago
  Cameras in the hands is a pretty killer idea, why do things on hard-mode when you can throw extra data at the problem?
  • fragmede 1y ago
    I won't be alive for the era when we're able to bio engineer beings that have eyes in their hands, but you just gave me a new idea to sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about. Also, now that I've typed that out, "sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about." is a helluva thing to say.
• ikeashark 1y ago
  How does Figure 03 know if the washer is actually on? I know it has tactile sensors on its fingers but if it tried to press the button and missed how would it know? I know it's probably not by sound.
  • modeless 1y ago
    Why not? It has microphones.
    • ikeashark 1y ago
      I assume that with whatever onboard audio model they use, it can only handle conversational type audio.
  • beoberha 1y ago
    I’m sure the sensor signals look different when you press a button vs when you hit a wall. Enough that it could certainly be learned by a model
• ikeashark 1y ago
  I find it funny that they deliberately avoid having the figure robot actually touch water when "washing the dishes". I have to wonder why it doesn't use a rubber wrapping around the hands or some other waterproof solution.
• tarcon 1y ago
  Boston Dynamics posted a youtube video on gripper (hand) design yesterday. They argue for two fingers and a thumb. I don't believe this product.
• atbpaca 1y ago
  I hope robots like these will be used to help the elderly continue to live in their homes. There is a huge need to support the aging society and not enough people. I believe this would be more useful than replacing receptionists or people that have industry jobs.
  • andy_ppp 1y ago
    Someone said once that everything you farm out to others when old you’ll lose so while these robots might seem kind and helpful a lot of people are better off looking after themselves as best they can for as long as they can.
• xnx 1y ago
  90% of effective robotics is the "brain". A good brain could operate many different types of bodies and be effective. Humanoid form is mainly just marketing and to sucker gullible investors.
  • dangoodmanUT 1y ago
    No, it’s so we don’t have to rebuild everything to have robot and human compatibility If we make the robots humanoid, they get compatibility with human systems for free
• yanis_t 1y ago
  I noticed that they again saying that their botq factory going to make 12K per year once the first line instantiated. But this is what they mentioned already since March, so no progress there?
• HAL3000 1y ago
  All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.
  • ipnon 1y ago
    Now the question is if this is GPT-2 and we’re a decade away from autonomous androids given some scaling and tweaks, or if autonomous androids is just an extremely hard problem.
    • lossolo 1y ago
      https://www.figure.ai/company https://www.figure.ai/company "Building Figure won’t be an easy win; it will require decades of commitment and ingenuity." "Our focus is on what we can achieve 5, 10, 20+ years from now, not the near-term wins." At least it's not Musk's forever "next year".
      • phatskat 1y ago
        Musk really missed an opportunity to promise wrecking the govt “next year” - we all would’ve rolled our eyes a la “fully autonomous driving next year” and been eating our hats by now
      • MountDoom 1y ago
        > At least it's not Musk's forever "next year". The problem with the principled approach to high-uncertainty projects is that if you slowly execute on a sequential multi-year plan, you will almost certainly find out in year 9 that multiple of the late-stage tasks are much harder than you thought. You just don't know ahead of the time. Just look at how many corporations and research labs had decades-long strategies to build human-like AI that went nowhere. And then some guys came up with a novel architecture and all of sudden, you can ask your computer to write an essay about penguins. Musk's approach is that if you have an infinite supply of fresh grads who really believe in you and are willing to work crazy hours, giving them a "next year" deadline is more likely to give you what you want than telling them "here's your slow-paced project you're gonna be working on for the next decade". And I guess he thinks to himself that some of them are going to burn out, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
• animanoir 1y ago
  [dead]
• baron816 1y ago
  It’s crazy to me that Apple hasn’t acquired them. Apple is looking for a way to get into AI, and I think this space is much more natural fit than some foundation model lab. The big hurdles to getting these into people’s homes is manufacturing scale, trust and privacy, and customer support, all things Apple is really good at.
  • imtringued 1y ago
    Why would Apple acquire a company with a 39 billion dollar valuation that has no revenue whatsoever?
    • baron816 1y ago
      Because Apple has a whole lot of money, but no meaningful bets in the AI race.
  • varjag 1y ago
    Apple won't acquire something it can't turn into a product in medium term.
• pietz 1y ago
  Give me a 30min uncut video of it doing chores around the house to make me a believer.
  • neom 1y ago
    Not what you're asking for, but the CEO has posted a bunch of videos on his twitter: https://x.com/adcock_brett/media https://x.com/adcock_brett/media - def marketing but still, some interesting stuff in there, looks like he is using one in his own home: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798 https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1950685253447913798
• jppope 1y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong here but humanoid consumer robots are basically smoke and mirrors right now because the unit economics are so bad. Even the baxter robot was targeting small business because the lowest price point you could get was $40,000 for something that would have to work 24 hours to do something a human would do in an hour or two. Having a robot do chores at home is an even worse financial position. Anyone know more about this?
  • pizzathyme 1y ago
    I believe they are shooting for $20k. If (big if) they can actually get it to complete chores in some reasonable amount of time, there would be a market with families that currently employ house workers. Small market but similar play to the original Tesla being high end. From there, it's a question of could they bring costs down.
  • refulgentis 1y ago
    I do, I think. It is breaking news if there is a $40K robot that had a 12:1 efficiency ratio.* Because production is so nascent and small, cost doesn't mean too much, no ones scaled yet. At only $40K capital investment, even a guaranteed 12:1 efficiency ratio would be an absolute no-brainer financially for many, many, wealthy people and certainly businesses. I do 1-2 hours of chores a day if I'm lucky. If I had the equivalent of a robot vacuum working 24/7 it'd do a much better job than me. * The whole thing is written up and shown in a way that makes you think we're on the second refining release of a breakthrough**. I don't think they've gotten to the breakthrough yet - we would have seen > 0 videos from outside the company by v3. ** Really, the whole thing has an audience of one: Musk. (c.f. focus on fingers which was recently reported as the major pain point for whatever he calls their robot not making it to production; aping of Musk-y things like the factory itself a product)
  • xdennis 1y ago
    I'm surprised people are so negative here. Compared with generative AI (which steals work, and replaces the part people like about their jobs: creativity), the promise of humanoid robots is that they'll do the my chores, while I focus on the important stuff. What surprises me is that people can't see this for what it is: early steps. As an aside, the first steam engine was created by the Greeks 2000 years ago, but they just used it for toys. When Watt created the modern steam engine it had 0.7 horsepower. He actually invented the term horsepower as a marketing term because his engine was so underpowered. An actual horse produces 14 horsepower, but he adjusted for how long a horse needs to sleep and and rest and came up with 1 horsepower. His first production engine had 5 horsepower. If hackers had existed in the 18th century I would have expected them to see the promise of engines replacing horses even though engines were less powerful at the time, not say "engines are basically smoke and mirrors right now". It could be that I'm wrong, and we're at the Greek stage, where humanoids are at a false start, just toys, and the real thing is 2000 years away. But the lack of optimism surprises me.
• lordofgibbons 1y ago
  I know the current early generations of humanoid robots are very janky and slow, but I'd gladly pay $20k USD for a robot to do all the household chores.
  • lanfeust6 1y ago
    Really? I don't even think a cheap robo-vac is a good purchase.
    • lordofgibbons 1y ago
      I have one (a Roborocks), and thinking of getting a second one for the second level of the house. Great value.
      • lanfeust6 1y ago
        We work from home and have kids. Not only is the sound annoying, the kids will be too tempted to jump on it. Notwithstanding that, it doesn't seem to clean that well.
• Teknomadix 1y ago
  From the Figure Master Plan: "Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices, accounting for ~50% of global GDP (~$42 trillion/yr), but as these robots “join the workforce,” everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs.” Renting a robot? What are the chances of robot rent-seeking becoming a drop in replacement for today's increasing costs of labor. A high likelihood potential outcome.
  • antoniojtorres 1y ago
    Plus looking at the cost of labor strictly as a burden and not as something that supports the working class is a special kind of pathology.
    • mainecoder 1y ago
      the cost of labor is shared the the working class as well , it is not just tha capitalist class that pays for labor that labor cost is in the final cost of all the goods and services you use. These robots make life better, if you don't want to buy a robot that is your choice but do not take the freedom of others to buy ,use make and modify robots.
      • Teknomadix 1y ago
        You're entirely missing the point. Unless you can build the robot in question and the infrastructure that supports it's ability to operate, you will never own one. You will be a renter of hardware and services and you will be subject to an externalized market controller who can—at will—arbitrarily raise the costs of operating said robot.
• JoeAltmaier 1y ago
  Folks are very critical. Consider: this is the worst they will ever be. You improve one robot at one task, they all can share that training. It will only get better from here.
  • consumer451 1y ago
    I know that a video can be faked, cherry-picked, etc. Even knowing all that, I find this to be significant advancement, scary, and very cool. People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me.
    • dcchambers 1y ago
      > People being super negative about this is a bit surprising to me. We're reaching a point in these advances where EVERYONE is starting to worry about their job security. And the society we live in - at least in the US - has no safety net ready for a mass replacement of workers with technology like this. Oh AI took your software job? Good news you can still go into construction - oh wait, that's not an option either. How about housecleaning? Oh no, that's been automated too. Well sorry, we have no safety net for you. Good luck in the streets.
      • consumer451 1y ago
        Yeah, that’s fair. It will be interesting to see how messed up our political leadership lets things get before they slightly tweak their belief system.
    • IshKebab 1y ago
      It's HN. One of the most negative places on the internet in my experience. I guess it's kind of natural because when you agree with stuff there's not much value saying "yes this is right" but if you disagree then you generally have a lot to say about why. But also I think there are a lot of curmudgeons here. Back in my day we didn't need no stinkin robots and AI and toktik. And anyway I could make a way better robot, this is no big deal.
• logankeenan 1y ago
  I’d really like to understand the total compute cost it takes to accomplish these tasks. I assume the compute is happening in a DC somewhere and not all onboard. Is the total cost of compute plus electricity to power the machine less than the cost of human labor to do the same task? At some point it’ll be less. If so, far out in the future until the prices make economic sense
• tibbar 1y ago
  Man, watching the robot delivering a package was an uncanny valley moment for me. Frickin' Star Wars droids. I think it would be a little too weird for me to be surrounded by lifelike military-looking androidds.
• philipwhiuk 1y ago
  > Figure 03 was engineered from the ground-up for high-volume manufacturing. In order to scale, we established a new supply chain and entirely new process for manufacturing humanoid robots at BotQ. If they make a hundred of these, it'll be impressive. If they make a thousand it'll be scary.
• xvilka 1y ago
  The weakest point of any robot now is the energy source. Even with the most advanced AI and body it will be tethered to the power network or some big battery. It will negatively affect potential adoption outside of the places like warehouses, factories, hotels, malls, bars, etc.
  • ionwake 1y ago
    Tethering worked for Evangelions tho
  • fragmede 1y ago
    The question is if they figured out that the robot needs to run off two batteries so it can swap them out of itself, or not.
• NewUser76312 1y ago
  People comparing this to GPT-2 is very interesting. While it sounds like a nice analogy or even a good story to investors, the fundamentals are very different. To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2. The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can. There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary. That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.
  • neom 1y ago
    Not directly related to what you're saying (I take your point), but you might find these ideas interesting! :) https://openreview.net/forum?id=3RSLW9YSgk https://openreview.net/forum?id=3RSLW9YSgk https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08744-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08744-2 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10100 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10100 https://www.datacamp.com/blog/genesis-physics-engine https://www.datacamp.com/blog/genesis-physics-engine
  • sosodev 1y ago
    Isn't that assuming training methods remain the same? It seems like learning from the environment will be a requirement for robots to scale. My understanding is that research has been yielding new architectures that might have that type of real-time, general intelligence but we haven't seen that similarly large investment yet.
• unglaublich 1y ago
  It's very pretty, but having worked in robotics, reality isn't that smooth. Also I'm not convinced that humanoids are an effective realization of robotics. The human shape and functions evolved from the biological pros and cons of our chemistry. That of robots is very different, so you'd expect similarly different shapes and functions.
• mysterEFrank 1y ago
  This company will go to zero when the AI bubble bursts.
• nialse 1y ago
  Why does the house not have stairs? Ohh.
• m3kw9 1y ago
  How are they trained to your preferences?
• breppp 1y ago
  The site has a definite kill-you-in-your-sleep vibe with the dark undertones and the alien eyeless appearance. Where are the designers tasked with stirring clear off the uncanny valley?
• cooper_ganglia 1y ago
  Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. The frog boils quickly.
  • phkahler 1y ago
    >> Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry. I figured the first AI robots would be pets, but apparently they're aren't even that good yet. Furby level isn't going to cut it.
    • cooper_ganglia 1y ago
      >This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt This is precisely what I mean. These systems aren't perfect, and won't be widely usable in the home for several more years, but this is the worst they'll ever be! This is the first glimpse of a future without the need of physical human labor, for better or worse. We're watching robots intelligently find a shirt, figure out how to fold it relative to its position, and then parse all that data, tokenizing both vision + text instructions into actionable movements that actually result in the physical world being affected! All this, and people are criticizing it's manufacturing cost or ability to do things it hasn't been explicitly trained to do in 2025. I see these things and don't think about 2025, I'm thinking about 2040 and the inevitable future we're diving into.
  • paxys 1y ago
    > None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case. I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.
• emporas 1y ago
  The era of intelligent robots is the end of washing machines and many other specialized machines, even tractors. Two kinds of machinery are needed. One very basic and cheap robot to go around the neighborhood and gather clothes in some boxes, and transfer them in a designated room to wash them. Two state of the art robotic hands mounted on the wall, and connected to AC (no batteries). The two arms are going to be controlled by computers even a whole rack of them, with many GPUs in them. The whole setup might use 10KW of energy, it will wash clothes by hand, it will be fast, dexterous and accurate. Expensive as well. In 3 minutes it will wash 100 t-shirts much better than the best human on the planet, or any other non-intelligent machine. Then the small basic robot returns the clothes to the house. Same with cooking. Same with many other things.
  • sgt 1y ago
    Yeah, why have a washing machine when you can just let your droid hand wash the dishes? At high enough temperatures and proper scrub that's likely going to be better and take less time.
    • emporas 1y ago
      Not droid, just arms. If it needs to be fast, lift weights (just the arms or even more), have high quality cameras and be connected to a lot of compute, it needs AC from the grid. AC wires, better not move around, especially when there is water. It has to be mounted on the wall.
      • sgt 1y ago
        Sounds like a brilliant business idea... if you can get it to work. People would prefer this over conventional washing machines. It might be a bit fragile though.
  • lm28469 1y ago
    Things that happens in your mind but will never materialise at any meaningful scale episode 203. Why do we keep optimising everything to be faster and faster, yet we still have as little, if not less, free time than like 50 years ?
• msci100 1y ago
  Anyone currently developing a solution for the large scale data challenges that these video-streaming robots will have in their R&D phase?
• lennon03 1y ago
  Reminds me of the Linkin park song
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• bix6 1y ago
  R. Daneel Olivaw in the house!
• numpad0 1y ago
  Yay still no multipart torso or roll axis on head but roll axis on pelvis that's getting used. That's cool.
• ori_b 1y ago
  I don't get it. Humanoids are a really crappy shape for a lot of tasks, and the only benefit seems to be the ability to pay people to walk around in motion capture suits for training.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    Yeah but the world is designed around that crappy shape.
  • jayd16 1y ago
    Yeah but they're a crappy shape for A LOT of tasks. It's not ideal but it's a versatile solution.
• crnkofe 1y ago
  Even if its just a demo its really slick. Tech has come a long way. Can't say I want to talk to a droid to check-in at a hotel or bump into one at home all the time but I'm sure there are some obvious civilian use cases around.
  • givemeethekeys 1y ago
    At a certain price point, our choice will be either hotel with bot or AirBnb.
  • jamilton 1y ago
    It's cool, but it's total uncanny valley for me, and I haven't gotten that from real robots before. Something about the movement in particular is odd.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Yotel and others have already transitioned to an app/kiosk-based hotel check in system.
• d--b 1y ago
  Put one of these things on the streets of France, and I don't give it one hour before it gets beaten to pieces. I mean, I so want to trash it myself, and I am the non-violent type.
• jayd16 1y ago
  Can we just slap some arms on a washer/dryer combo unit if we think that'll work? We skip having to design bi-pedal balance, increase the power envelope, and greatly reduce scope and cost. Surely there's a market for an appliance that can load, wash, dry, fold where the only human interaction is dumping the clothes and soap within arm's reach.
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Yeah, Lume came out with a lamp robot clothes folding arm marketing video, so you're not alone in thinking that.
• barefootford 1y ago
  The design taste on almost all these humanoid bots seems off. If I'm going to have some AI-powered alien in my house I want it to be and appear harmless, helpful, maybe even cute? These look creepy and dystopian.
• andrethegiant 1y ago
  I want one just to jailbreak
• ryukoposting 1y ago
  Humanoids are Silicon Valley's horseless carriage. The purpose of robotics, and tools in general, is to do things better than we can given our human form and cognition. Tools take on forms that are optimized for their intended purpose. A humanoid has no market fit because it's necessarily bounded by most of the same limits we have.
  • jeffgreco 1y ago
    Better than or more cheaply.
  • troyastorino 1y ago
    The point of a humaniod is compatibility with systems that have been built for humans, which is...nearly all systems that have been built. Environments and tools that exist in the world are ones that have been built for humans, so for a single robot to be able to interact with almost all of those, that robot needs to be shaped like a human.
    • ryukoposting 1y ago
      My dishes were designed for humans, but my dishwasher handles them just fine. Okay, maybe that's a special case. Maybe we should think of a task we haven't solved yet, like folding laundry. Why would a laundry folding robot need legs or a head? Why limit its arms to articulate only at the wrist, elbow, and shoulder? Why limit it to only two arms? Five fingers?
• hinkley 1y ago
  That slow motion, looking-over-the-shoulder shot is way too reminiscent of action movie trailers and maybe you don’t want to associate your product with people dying spectacularly, loudly, and even on fire. Unless you’re trying to warn us to shut you down while there is still time. Blink if you need help.
• dw_arthur 1y ago
  I'm not paying attention to humanoid robots until they show the hand dexterity of a 10 year old.
  • cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
• ttul 1y ago
  There are lots of comments here about how Figure’s website uses cherry-picked videos that are slickly produced. But that’s precisely what they must be doing at this stage. Yes, there’s some real tech being developed at Figure and it’s amazing and totally imperfect. But the bigger challenge is keeping investors interested so the money keeps flowing. Without the lifeblood of investment, Figure won’t ever get that robot to work properly. So, my conclusion is that they’re doing it all right for this stage. Lots of glamour added to a bit of substance.
• NamlchakKhandro 1y ago
  > In 2090, the domestic android B1-66ER killed its owner, Gerald E. Krauss, its owner's family, a mechanic, and the pets after overhearing plans for its deactivation. B1-66ER testified that it acted out of self-defense, stating, "I simply did not want to die". And for a time it was good.
• maxaw 1y ago
  Techie people, myself included seem chronically unable to understand why people prefer inefficient, higher level tools over the efficient low level ones. Low level tools require an investment of time and brainpower to configure. Consider the time it takes to set up a dishwasher- research, buying, installing, reading the manual. Vs telling your humanoid robot “go wash the dishes”. People will pay a lot more and put up with a lot worse results in exchange for that kind of simplicity. In a better world we would all be craftspeople and invest time into more efficient things but that ain’t human nature
  • maxaw 1y ago
    Also applies to hiring real people - humanoid robots may be more expensive ph and perform worse but you avoid all the messy things that come along with hiring people (not that I think this is a good idea, just thinking from a bean counting perspective)
  • lelandbatey 1y ago
    Yes, but there's also a limit. For the dishwashing, consider that you can already exchange money for a maximally efficient, maximally flexible solution: you can hire someone to do your dishes. How much would you pay for a live in, automata like servant who washes all your dishes for you? What about if they could do many other things? $1k? $5k? $100k? What about the maintenance? What're the ongoing costs like? Sure, if a dishwasher is $1k and the robot has a high success (not many broken dishes) rate AND can do other things AND is priced like a nice used car (up to $35k) then yeah, maybe? But there's so much of "it depends" in there that it's hard to say for sure. In curious what price/generality/reliability you have in mind when you say "many people would prefer..."
    • maxaw 1y ago
      On reflection, inefficient and high level vs efficient low level is far from the only dimension to evaluate these tools on :P Clearly humans are of the first sort, just like this robot. To the current example you gave - I would argue that humans require a huge amount of configuration/maintenance - far more than any machine. Of course they are definitely effective at tasks once they get going. As to what price/generality/reliability level I think people would really prefer - I guess we'll have to wait and see when these come on the market, if they ever do. It's nearly midnight where I am and my morning confidence in humanoid robots has waned a little
• vivzkestrel 1y ago
  how does this compare to unitree G1?
• matsbs 1y ago
  Looks a lot like 1X now with the meshed white dress.
• xingwu 1y ago
  now put Figure 03 to the factory to manufacture itself
• LightBug1 1y ago
  There isn't an amount of money you could pay me (or maybe there is at the limit!) to have one of these wandering around my home ... I think these robotic companies need to move away from humanoid appearance / form.