"First time seeing a humanoid robot actually doing a task in a home."

Dirty Laundry

Humanoid robots remain far-fetched — but certain demos are starting to suggest a plausible future in which they could actually become common fixtures in regular households.

In an impressive new demo, humanoid robot company Figure founder Brett Adcock showed off the company's F.02 robot effortlessly loading dirty laundry from a basket into a washing machine.

Adcock can be seen adding items of clothing to the basket as the robot is loading the machine, demonstrating it wasn't part of a pre-scripted demo.

"This is not teleoperated," he explained on X-formerly-Twitter. "We’re running Helix, our in-house neural network."

"First time seeing a humanoid robot actually doing a task in a home," another user commented. "Makes me realise how close we are to this becoming a reality."

Laundry Robot Uprising

Adcock was talking about Figure's "generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model," called Helix, which allows its humanoid robots to make decisions on the fly based on perception and language inputs.

We've already seen the F.02 robot expertly sorting packages at a logistics warehouse, dealing with packages of various sizes, shapes, and hardnesses and manipulating their orientation with impressive deftness.

Last year, the company tested its robots at a BMW car factory in South Carolina, supporting "plant employees performing ergonomically awkward and exhausting tasks to take the strain off them."

Figure is only one player in the growing humanoid robot industry. Companies including Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robotics are racing to gain a first-mover advantage with a truly practical model.

When their offerings will gain the necessary skills to make them financially feasible remains to be seen. However, Chinese companies, most notably Unitree, are starting to offer humanoid robots for extremely competitive prices, suggesting we could be seeing far more of them at the workplace and even loading our washing machines sooner than you'd think.

More on Figure: Watching This Humanoid Robot Sort Packages Is Quite Something


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