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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

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Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#171
post #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…

I personally don’t care about human receptionist. I rather get it faster

My initial reaction to the hotel scene was: Ehhh, I like being able to read lips, as I wear hearing aids.

But yeah, I'd happily just check in at a kiosk and get my room card that way. (And I'm sure phone-as-key, no-contact check-in is only going to get more common)

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#172
The era of intelligent robots is the end of washing machines and many other specialized machines, even tractors.

Two kinds of machinery are needed.

One very basic and cheap robot to go around the neighborhood and gather clothes in some boxes, and transfer them in a designated room to wash them.

Two state of the art robotic hands mounted on the wall, and connected to AC (no batteries). The two arms are going to be controlled by computers even a whole rack of them, with many GPUs in them. The whole setup might use 10KW of energy, it will wash clothes by hand, it will be fast, dexterous and accurate. Expensive as well. In 3 minutes it will wash 100 t-shirts much better than the best human on the planet, or any other non-intelligent machine.

Then the small basic robot returns the clothes to the house.

Same with cooking. Same with many other things.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#173

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.…

You mean like the Roomba robots enabled with cameras that have sent embarrassing images back to the mothership where employees have access to the footage and then share on their socials? No, not could be. They already are. I never did follow the home security system with a drone that would fly around your home with a camera. Not sure if that died a glorious death because it was just dumb or what happened to it. I was…

You're exaggerating. The images were from paid staff who had the vacuums in their homes to collect data, including images. They knew that was happening. iRobot said the devices were labeled with a bright green sticker that read “video recording in progress,”

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#174

Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. The frog boils quickly.

>> Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry. I figured the first AI robots would be pets,…

  >This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt
This is precisely what I mean. These systems aren't perfect, and won't be widely usable in the home for several more years, but this is the worst they'll ever be! This is the first glimpse of a future without the need of physical human labor, for better or worse.

We're watching robots intelligently find a shirt, figure out how to fold it relative to its position, and then parse all that data, tokenizing both vision + text instructions into actionable movements that actually result in the physical world being affected!

All this, and people are criticizing it's manufacturing cost or ability to do things it hasn't been explicitly trained to do in 2025. I see these things and don't think about 2025, I'm thinking about 2040 and the inevitable future we're diving into.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#176

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.

being aware of and tending to your immediate environment (including cleaning it) is not thankless, pointless busywork. it's important to maintain some level of relationship to your environment; the more we disengage with it, the likelier we are to care less for it or the people who share it.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#178

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.…

"Figure 03 also includes 10 Gbps mmWave data offload capability, allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement."

Yeah I'll pass thanks.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#179

Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue. The frog boils quickly.

> None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago.

Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.

Re: Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

#180
post #78

All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not u…

Rodney Brooks (of iRobot fame) wrote an essay recently about why humanoids are likely decades and not years away from fulfilling their promise. It is quite long, but even a gpt summary will be quite valuable.

https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

In short, he makes the case that unlike text and images, human dexterity is based on sensory inputs that we barely understand, that these robots don't have, and it will take a long time to get the right sensors in, get the right data recorded, and only then train them to the level of a human. He is very skeptical that they can learn from video-only data, which is what the companies are doing.

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