On August 6, Figure AI announced the release of Figure 02, a second-generation humanoid robot, using the company’s and its CEO’s social media profiles rather than a traditional news conference. Even with this unorthodox strategy, the announcement made headlines throughout the world.
At 1.70 meters in height and 70 kg in weight, Figure 02 is said to be the strongest humanoid robot to date. For the robot, the Figure AI team created a contemporary exoskeleton that closely resembles humanoid robots seen in popular culture. Figure 02 seems more ready for market deployment than its predecessor. Additional improvements to reduce tripping dangers in production settings include focused interfaces in the limbs and buried wiring.
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The team improved Figure 02’s eyes, brain, limbs, and other features, almost reconstructing them, according to Figure AI. Compared to Figure 01, the robot has more potent visual, perceptual, and interaction abilities. With 16 degrees of mobility and strength similar to human hands, its hands, wrists, and fingers can perform various tasks.
Figure 02 is a complete artificial intelligence-based vision system with six RGB cameras on its head, front torso, and back torso. The robot’s “brain,” created in association with OpenAI, has integrated speakers and microphones to enable direct human-to-human communication. Its visual language model (VLM) is capable of both commonsense visual reasoning and semantic understanding.
In some ways, Figure 02 is also superior to human capabilities. It can operate constantly for more than 20 hours because of its 2.25 kilowatt-hour battery, which is a 50% improvement over the previous version. It also has a more powerful CPU and GPU, tripling Figure 01’s computational and reasoning capacity.
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These enhancements are intriguing, particularly in light of Figure 01’s possibilities. The robot previously made an impression by bringing over an apple from a table after being told to bring over some food. This feature demonstrates the robot’s capacity to visually identify objects and their meanings in addition to comprehending words.
In the past, the purpose of humanoid robots was not so much to serve practical purposes as to demonstrate cutting-edge technology. They are now, at last, making real progress, starting with factories. Commencing with the labor-intensive and less optimal conditions of automobile plants, Figure AI’s approach is similar to Tesla’s Optimus.
Declaring in January that it would be working with BMW to install robots in the latter’s car factories, Figure AI asserts that its robots are capable of handling laborious, dangerous, or challenging activities in the real world on their own. This was demonstrated in a program where the robot learned how to make coffee in 10 hours, demonstrating human-like accuracy in interacting with its surroundings. In a second display, Figure 02 showed off comparable skills by moving automobile parts freely and walking smoothly across a factory.
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Factories are only the start, though. The founder of Figure AI, Brett Adcock, stated in the company’s master plan that the ultimate objective is to make it possible for humanoid robots to be used in homes and workplaces.
Adcock founded Figure AI in 2022, and it has since grown to become a Silicon Valley phenomenon. Having dedicated the ensuing thirty years to optimizing its influence on human well-being, In under two years, Figure AI has introduced two solutions under Adcock’s supervision, focusing on application scenarios such as healthcare, logistics distribution, and warehouse management.
Significant investment has been made in Figure AI, raising USD 730 million to date. The firm was valued at USD 2.6 billion after raising USD 675 million in the most recent Series B fundraising round from investors such as Intel, OpenAI, Amazon, Nvidia, Ark Invest, Parkway Capital, and Align Ventures. In addition to being a significant partner, OpenAI is an investor in the project to create a general-purpose, cognitively and structurally robust humanoid robot.
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It might be evident that humanity is approaching a new technological era as a result of Silicon Valley’s wealth and cutting-edge technology coming together to create humanoid robots.
From its attendance at this year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) and the Nvidia GTC to the release of its most recent product, Figure AI’s trajectory is consistent with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s prediction that the robot era is here and that embodied intelligence may represent the next major advancement in AI.
