Ex-Boston Dynamics, Tesla employees introduce general-purpose humanoid robot

Artificial intelligence robotics company Figure unveiled its humanoid robot Figure 01. The company claims that it is the ‘world’s first commercially viable general-purpose robot’. 

The team managed to complete the full-scale build of the robot in six months and plans to begin testing it in the coming months. The robot is designed for initial deployment into the workforce to address labour shortage, and in long term, completely eliminate the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs, the company said in a statement. As per IEEE Spectrum, the final robot will be fully electric, 1.6 meters tall, weigh 60 kilograms in weight with 20 kilograms payload.

Figure was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, the founder of the aviation company Archer and hiring marketplace Vettery. Figure’s team consists of 40 industry experts who have 100 years of experience in the field of AI and robotics between them. This includes former employees of Boston Dynamics, Tesla, GoogleX, Apple, Cruise, among others. Jerry Pratt, who was earlier working at Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is the chief technology officer (CTO).

"Today we're seeing unprecedented labour shortages with tens of millions of unsafe or undesirable jobs in the US alone. If we want continued growth, we need more productivity — which means more automation. Once Figure's humanoids are deployed to work alongside us, we'll have the potential to produce an abundance of affordable, more widely available goods and services to a degree the world has never seen,” said Adcock.

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Adcock said that these humanoid robots will be first deployed in warehouses. The company wants to first use the robots for single big application and subsequently add software for them to perform a wide variety of tasks, and eventually make them affordable and competitive in cost with human labour.