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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
What happens if it can't get to the charger in time to do the swap? Same problem roombas have where you have to fish them out from under your couch, except now the damn thing is 5 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds.
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.
"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement."
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 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.
>> 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
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
So I’ve ranting for years that hotels and car rental places should automate check-in - it should take only seconds to get your key with pre-filled data and a QR code.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
I was recently thinking about this dynamic about human-oriented vs efficiency-oriented innovation. We haven't really hesitated (in, I'd argue, the majority of cases) to pick efficiency over human-friendliness. This seems like it will be a big reckoning as robotics arrives. The argument for humanoids is that the world is built for humans, but as robotics start to be capable of completing tasks end-to-end, then suddenly there is no reason to keep the space human-friendly, and humanoids kinda lose their value.
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
Ridiculous, but ironically I think walking robots as self-relocating computers might be the most readily viable.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
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.
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.
> It's going to be wild when these things cost 30 grand, and we all start having them in our houses
> 30 grand
> we all start having them in our houses
Have you traveled ? Even a bit ? Most people don't make 30k in a year, before tax. It just shows how utterly disconnected from reality tech people, and especially execs, are. Virtually no one is going to pay 30k for a bot to mop the floor and fold their clothes
As for myself even if you'd pay me 30k I'd refuse to have one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable.
In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.
This is always the case, though. The company is few years old. I'm no disciple of humanoids, but stuff has to start somewhere. Unfortunately hype > truth in order to get funding, so it produces incentives to cherry-pick like this.
An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking.
That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that?
It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan.
Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise.
So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task.
Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.)
Oh wow, a robot that can play with my dog so I don't have to. That's exactly the kind of task I'd be relieved to automate.
The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed.
I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.
I wonder if instead of making a robot to interact with the washing machine we should try to make a washing machine with an input and output hopper. Dump clothing in get clean folded clothing out.
You can control the happy path when the whole thing is your box.
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.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 66.5 ms ] thread> 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.
Alongside the full replacement of jobs and with autonomous robots, This is the exact definition of "AGI".
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...
Yeah I'll pass thanks.
Going to be a wild ride.
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.
I would pay extra to avoid it - just let me download a pass like a boarding pass to my Apple Wallet as I walk through the front door and head directly to my room.
This week, I had my first experience with exactly this at a car hire company. It was… not smooth.
It took multiple attempts (with requests for help to the employees in between) to get the system to recognise our code, whereupon we learned (by way of an unhelpful generic error message) that the system had somehow given someone else ‘our’ car. After another round of asking for human help, we had to wait while someone came outside, unlocked the machine, and put the keys for our new car inside. We then went through the code process again, and were finally given the keys.
The vision is somewhere there, but the execution isn’t exactly the future we’re hoping for!
An illustrative example is a warehouse. They're still partly designed for humans because they're not fully automated, but the need to make them human-friendly will disappear soon.
Small servers with console, PA speakers, field metrology or data acquisition machines, those things could have the lower torso or two for this and relocated as needed. The PhD guys can just park the truck and let those deploy wherever AI thinks >65% suitable for human use on their own, instead of users burning 15% of brain juice thinking and executing that. That would be immensely useful.
(also re: hotels that others are commenting, there were never technical reasons the door keycard readers couldn't ever had doubled as credit card readers - I think the reason why clerks are required is for sanity check, that the guests aren't in need of immediate safety/health assistance and ok to proceed to beds)
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.
Equal parts terror, awe, fear, when it comes to having a robot in my home.
> 30 grand
> we all start having them in our houses
Have you traveled ? Even a bit ? Most people don't make 30k in a year, before tax. It just shows how utterly disconnected from reality tech people, and especially execs, are. Virtually no one is going to pay 30k for a bot to mop the floor and fold their clothes
As for myself even if you'd pay me 30k I'd refuse to have one.
Also, now that I've typed that out, "sit down with ChatGPT and have a nice chat about." is a helluva thing to say.
https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.
https://youtu.be/nmEy1_75qHk
They for sure did not anticipate that the user would backflip into their robot and knock it (and himself) out :D
An obvious application, if this robot could do it, is retail store shelf restocking. That's a reasonably constrained pick and place task, some mobility is necessary, and the humanoid form is appropriate working in aisles and shelves spaced for humans. How close is that?
It's been tried before. In 2020.[1] And again in 2022.[2] That one runs on a track, is closer to an traditional industrial robot, and is used by 7-11 Japan.
Robots that just cruise around stores and inspect the shelves visually are in moderately wide use. They just compare the shelf images with the planogram; they don't handle the merchandise. So there are already systems to help plan the restocking task.
Technical University Delft says their group should be able to do this in five years.[3] (From when? No date on press release.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHgdW1HYLbM
[2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/telexistence-convenience-store...
[3] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/shelf-stocking-ro...
The fabric wrap is idiotic. Insanely stupid. Let's have an expensive fabric-covered robot wash dishes covered in food. Genius. It's a good thing those "dirty dishes" were already perfectly clean. I doubt this machine could handle anything more. Put it in a real commercial kitchen and have it scrape oven pans and I'll be impressed.
I'm so glad I left robotics. I don't want to have anything to do with this very silly bubble.
…and have a surprise dance-off.
You can control the happy path when the whole thing is your box.