Figure AI Inc.’s humanoid robots sorted packages for around 50 hours nonstop without intervention, Chief Executive Officer Brett Adcock said, a milestone in showing their ability to take on everyday tasks.
“There’s absolutely no teleoperation into this,” Adcock said Friday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Sometimes when the robot takes a turn to the left to grab packages, it moves its left hand out of the way upwards. You’ll see this behavior happen every single time the robot turns for packages.”
His comments underscored Figure’s contention that the robots were working autonomously in a live-streamed demonstration that drew millions of viewers. The trial triggered Internet speculation about whether they were working on their own, after the video showed incidents such as hand gestures that were interpreted as signs of human control.
The robots operated using Figure’s Helix 02 software running fully onboard, with no remote human involvement, Adcock said. Over about 50 hours, the robots processed close to 60,000 packages at human speed with almost no downtime on a moving belt, he said.
The system runs on four-hour battery cycles, with robots automatically signaling for replacements when power runs low before walking off for wireless charging while another unit takes over, according to Adcock.
Closely held Figure is now manufacturing between 60 and 70 humanoid robots weekly at its facility, reaching several thousand units annually as it scales production, Adcock said. The Sunnyvale, California-based company has designed the entire hardware stack in-house while also training all AI neural networks internally as part of a fully vertically integrated approach, he said.
Figure’s robots currently operate at roughly human speed of about three seconds per package, with a goal of reaching 90% success rates when packages flip for barcode scanning, Adcock said. The company’s largest bottlenecks are data for training neural networks and manufacturing capacity rather than capital, he said. Figure has more than $1 billion cash on its balance sheet, he said.
Adcock, who also founded Archer Aviation and recently launched Hark with $100 million of his own funding, said Figure aims to build systems comparable to the movie I, Robot.
Written by: Edward Ludlow and Caroline Hyde @Bloomberg (This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.)
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