Privately-developed humanoid robots are advancing at a striking clip, which means today’s innovation may soon be tomorrow’s pile of junk. But with so many other companies racing to develop the hot robot, how do the hundreds of robotics startups clogging the landscape keep their obsolete units away from prying eyes?
That question has been asked and answered by at least one robotics firm in the US, Figure AI. This week, Figure released a wild promo video showcasing the “decommissioning” of its F.02 units, involving Arnold Schwarzenegger and an industrial vat of red hot liquid steel.
If you’ve seen the 1991 action epic “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” you can probably see where this is heading. The nearly four-minute-long production features numerous F.02 units being directed to leap into a massive vat of liquid steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland — apparently the only facility that would let Foundry pull off the stunt, given the lithium-ion batteries the bots are powered by.
The clip begins with a schlocky reference to the Terminator franchise, with a lone unit walking onto a gangplank above the vat of molten metal. It’s then shown grabbing onto a chain — in reality it probably had plenty of help from human handlers — before lowering itself into the steel, a reference to the death of Schwarzenegger’s robot character in the film.
But the real action comes near the end, when Figure films a number of its robots leaping and diving into the red hot cistern.
It evidently wasn’t an easy feat. As the company explains in a press release, the stunt involved training its F.02 units to dive off a balcony in a test environment, and then no small degree of luck at the Finish foundry.
“The team had just 24 hours and six melts to get it right, and each melt had only a 20-minute window before the molten steel cooled and formed a hard crust,” the presser explained. “Despite the extreme heat and electromagnetic fields, the robots ran their AI policies seamlessly, even as camera equipment and other electronics failed in this environment.”
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