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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

figure.ai

21–30 of 417 posts

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#21

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?

If you believe that thankless, pointless busywork is a virtue, then surely, Sisyphus must be the most virtuous man of them all.

I have come to think cleaning is actually one of the most virtuous acts for a human. Even more so as we live in societies which produce waste as a fundamental mode of operation

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#22

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?

Im willing to bet 95% of American homes have a pile of laundry they would very much like a robot to wash, dry, fold, and put away while they go to their jobs during the week so they can have more free time on the weekends

The robot doesnt even have to do laundry in a smart, efficient, or speedy way, it can be much slower than a human as long as it gets it done before the next week has arrived it is helping countless people

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#23
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.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/...

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#24

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 wa…

Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them.

But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in...

Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#25
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

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#26
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.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#27
post #13

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 ph…

Yeah, that's a very good metric to look for. In the software space, one of the coolest things and a clear signal that "AI coding" is here was watching Aider's graph of "amount of code aider wrote itself in each PR" and seeing that number go up.

On the robot side, there are many things that have to go right. Hardware needs to become good enough, reliable enough and cheap enough to scale. Then you have the software stack on top that needs to scale in training, fine-tuning, control and generalisation. None of these are "easy" even in a lab setting. Doing it at scale, in production will be huge. And then there's data collection, where whoever does it better will probably win. Collecting data in peoples houses is problematic, but on the factory floor should be ok.

ATM my bet is on Tesla being the best positioned to best deliver (eventually). They have plenty of experience on all fronts, and more importantly they have ample places to test them. Their factories are as automated as possible, so it's safe to say that every human being still doing manual labor is critical in their role. As soon as they can replace some of them with humanoids, and see the "task success" number go up, they can scale it up all over their floors. And we know they can scale.

I used to think that generalist humanoid robots are still 10y out, due to hardware and generalist software stacks, but it seems like things are heating up. It's gonna be an interesting next decade.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#28
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.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#29
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.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#30
post #24

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 wa…

Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them. But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in... Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of…

I believe Elon has said before re:Tesla factory that plugging in cords is one of the hardest things to automate.
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