We’ve come across video after video of humanoid robots performing backflips, delivering punches — and even a clip of a robot kicking the CEO of its maker squarely in the chest.
Don’t get us wrong, the aerobatics on display are impressive — but it’s not hugely practical, since it’s not like we’re being swarmed by waves of armed bad guys on a daily basis.
Fortunately, not every robotics maker is doubling down on martial arts. Case in point, California-based company Figure recently introduced the second iteration of its humanoid robot AI software, called Helix 02. In a video released this week, the company’s black-and-white android, dubbed Figure 02, can be seen seamlessly unloading a dishwasher and placing clean dishes in upper cabinets and drawers before loading dirty dishes back into it.
It’s an impressive demo. Certain human-like flourishes highlight how Helix 02 was relying on motion-captured training data, from using its foot to kick up the opened dishwasher door to bumping a drawer closed with its hip.
The company claims in a press release that a “single neural system” can control the “full body directly from pixels, enabling dexterous, long horizon autonomy across an entire room.”
The dishwasher demonstration is a “four-minute, end-to-end autonomous task that integrates walking, manipulation, and balance with no resets and no human intervention,” per Figure. “We believe this is the longest horizon, most complex task completed autonomously by a humanoid robot to date.”
Helix 02’s dishwasher mastery was the result of being trained on over 1,000 hours of “human motion data and sim‑to‑real reinforcement learning,” the company claimed. And it’s not a one-hit wonder: we’ve already seen Figure 02 deftly sort packages at a logistics warehouse, load a washing machine, and even fold laundry.
However, how the robot would fare in a different — and perhaps far messier — kitchen remains to be seen. Flashy tech demos like this one should always be taken with a grain of salt, particularly when they’re meant to convey how robots could one day navigate an unpredictable real-world environment, rather than a carefully set-up and controlled stage.
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