Figure AI, the robotics company and German automobile giant BMW just announced significant improvements in the capabilities of the Figure 02 humanoid, operating on a production line. The company claims that Figure 02 is now capable of operating as an ‘autonomous fleet’, with a 400% increase in speed, and sevenfold improvement in success rate.
Figure released a new video that demonstrates the capabilities of the humanoid. Bred Adcock, founder and CEO at Figure, said that humanoid is running up to 1,000 placements a day, and said “This will only improve as we deploy more robots, collect more data, and improve our AI models.”
The video also showcased the humanoid’s abilities in a high-precision, sheet metal insertion task, into a pin-pole less than 1 cm wide. Adcock said that the use case was quite challenging to deploy autonomously, with a high degree of reliability.
This involved grabbing ‘difficult to handle’ sheet metal parts with a precision that directly influenced their placement and releasing the object without the robot colliding with the metal fixture. To satisfy the task requirements, the cycle time of the operation had to be reduced by four minutes.
“It was arguably 10x harder than any stationary tabletop manipulation task we’ve showcased before,” said Adcock.
1k placements a day—long-horizon tasks—using vision-only—learned behaviors for very precise <1cm sheet metal insertion.
Requires intense engineering across multiple disciplines. https://t.co/nfMQUXmZe1 pic.twitter.com/M4wjm2MHsI— The Humanoid Hub (@TheHumanoidHub) November 19, 2024
The companies partnered earlier this year and successfully tested the humanoid at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg. This was the first time BMW used a humanoid robot in its production line.
BMW had said that “there are no Figure AI robots at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, and there is no definite timetable established for bringing Figure robots to the plant.” However, it was reported that the Figure humanoid will return to BMW’s plant in January 2025.
Figure AI raised a $675 million Series B funding, led by OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos. The California-based humanoid maker is currently valued at $2.6 billion. Interestingly, Adcock also mentioned that they are nowhere near the maximum speed that can be achieved by the motors, and Figure is looking forward to deploying more humanoid robots in real-world environments by 2025.
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