Earlier this month, AI robotics firm Figure released a video showing Figure 02, the company's autonomous humanoid robot powered by a visual language system called Helix, loading clothes into a laundry machine to be washed.

Now, the company says that the robot has a new skill: folding laundry.

Figure announced the capability in a blog post yesterday, celebrating the news as a landmark event for the company and autonomous laundry frontiers writ large.

The robot's folding prowess, the company declared, marks the "first instance of a humanoid robot with multi-fingered hands folding laundry fully autonomously using an end-to-end neural network."

The firm shared a video alongside the announcement, and we must admit: it's pretty impressive. Though the bipedal robot looks a little bit awkward at times, it can be seen picking up unfolded hand towels, gingerly tucking them into neat rectangles, and gently piling the folded cloths into a wicker basket.

While laundry might be a monotonous task for actual humans, Figure made sure to note that the everyday chore represents "one of the most challenging dexterous manipulation tasks for a humanoid robot."

"Towels are deformable, constantly changing shape, bending unpredictably, and prone to wrinkling or tangling," argued Figure. "There's no fixed geometry to memorize, and no single 'correct' grasp point. Even a slight slip of a finger can cause the material to bunch or fall."

The impressive demonstration highlights just how far the tech has come thanks to machine learning, hinting at a future where humanoid robots could be helping out with everyday tasks — that is, if you can afford to buy one.

Figure also claims that its bot learned the skill without the company making any significant changes to Helix; on the contrary, it simply fed the model a new dataset. That's important for the company as well as its potential customers. As it stands, building, training, and buying autonomous humanoids carries a hefty price tag.

It's been a big year for Figure. Back in June, the company showed Figure 02 accurately sorting through packages at a mail sorting facility. Impressive as the video was, it served as a reminder of the kind of human jobs that could soon be on the line.

And with CEOs frothing at the mouth to replace human roles with AI, Figure's latest demo is yet another sign that automation could soon be coming for both white and blue-collar jobs.

In short, it's not so much a question of if, but when.

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


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