Figure gradually prepares his humanoid robot to competently take on household chores. While the California-based company has ambitions to use its robot in industrial environments such as factories and warehouses, it also plans to develop a robot that can function in a home.
A new video (above) released by Figure on Monday shows its humanoid robot cleaning up a mess – but not to messy – living room, put away a few toys, rearrange pillows, place the remote neatly on the coffee table and do a little polishing.
The autonomous, bipedal bot doesn’t move at lightning speed, but it moves at a steady pace and with natural movements, and you can easily imagine it working quietly while the house’s residents are out and about or even sleeping.
The robot is powered by the latest version of Figure’s proprietary vision-voice-action AI called Helix 02. It is powerful enough to allow the robot to learn a task for which it has not yet been trained.
“If you could give a home robot a task, ‘cleaning up the living room’ would be at the top of the list,” Figure says in a post accompanying the video. “But from a robotics perspective, this task is incredibly difficult. Unlike more structured commercial tasks, a living room is constantly changing. Objects are scattered unpredictably. Furniture creates narrow navigation paths. Soft objects like towels and pillows behave dynamically. Many actions require both hands, while others require having one hand free in the middle of a task. And almost every behavior involves moving through the space while manipulating something.”
While the video demonstrates some of the robot’s impressive capabilities, the meaningful use of humanoid robots in the home still faces significant challenges. For example, houses are highly variable and crowded environments, so robots must be carefully trained to reliably recognize objects, navigate narrow spaces, and manipulate many different objects without error.
Safety and reliability are also crucial as the robot would work near people (including small children), pets and fragile objects. Another consideration is cost, as current humanoid robots are expensive to build and maintain.
Figure is one of many companies pushing forward in the industry, with stiff competition from Chinese companies like Unitree causing the global race to lead humanoid robots to heat up. This year is sure to be an exciting one in the rapidly evolving field of humanoid robots.
