By Jeff Brown, Editor, The Bleeding Edge

Three months ago, Figure AI announced its second-generation humanoid robot, Figure 02.

Figure 02 | Source: Figure AI

At 5’6” weighing in at 70 kilograms (kg) – with a runtime of five hours and a 20 kg payload capacity – Figure 02 is designed to be a highly functional humanoid robot.

The goal is for it to work safely alongside humans.

Side by Side

Figure is a company Bleeding Edge readers will be familiar with.

The company’s goal is simple: To create a product that will address the global labor shortages and also take on jobs that are either unsafe or tend to cause injury to humans due to repetitive stress.

The launch of Figure 02 is significant, as it is designed for commercial adoption both in industrial settings and, eventually, in the home.

It may not look like the kind of humanoid robot portrayed by Robin Williams’s 1999 film, Bicentennial Man, but that’s precisely where this technology is going.

I wrote about Figure AI and its first generation product – Figure 01 – in Outer Limits – BMW Just “Hired” Its First Humanoid Robot. This is a great example of Figure’s application in a factory setting to address industrial labor shortages.

At the time, BMW had just begun collaborating with Figure AI to test Figure 01. The goal was to identify specific tasks that the Figure robot is best suited for.

In that Outer Limits issue, I made the following prediction:

It’s likely that BMW will have Figure 01 robots working side-by-side with humans within 12 months in Spartanburg.

Spartanburg is a reference to BMW’s Spartanburg manufacturing plant, where the initial testing began. And here we are, 10 months later – both Figure and BMW are still working together.

BMW is planning to employ Figure 02 in volume in January of 2025, precisely a year later, side by side with human workers.

Source: Figure AI

The progress has been stunning.

Figure 02 is now an autonomous fleet – now working 400% faster with a seven-times improvement in success rate for assigned tasks.

Is it perfect yet? No.

But that’s not what we use to measure success.

The Rate of Improvement That Matters

What we’re tracking is the rate of improvement – the rate of technological advancement.

As a reminder, Figure AI is a company that was just established and funded in early 2022. It has been around for less than three years, and it now has autonomous humanoid robots capable of working in an automotive manufacturing plant.

Source: Figure AI

As we can see in the short video above, these robots are still slower than human workers, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that they are 400% faster than they were in January and that they are speeding up at an impressive rate.

And while these tasks might look simple to us, they require an incredible level of precision. The robot must correctly place the sheet metal parts accurately onto pin poles that are less than one centimeter wide.

“We are nowhere near the maximum speed that can be achieved by the motors,” Figure’s CEO recently said. He was referring to the servomotors in Figure’s robots, which are the “motors” that enable precise control over positioning and speed.

What he was implying is that as the artificial intelligence that controls Figure 02 improves, the hardware will be able to further improve precision and increase its speed.

In order words, it won’t be long before a Figure humanoid robot is capable of moving faster than a human with perfect repeatability.

What’s the secret to the rapid progress?

The Race to 1 Million Units

Figure AI adopted OpenAI’s multi-modal large language model as a foundation for its artificial intelligence.

That allowed Figure AI to focus more energy on the hardware design for Figure 01 and 02. It also adopted an approach used by Tesla for both full self-driving and its Optimus design – by implementing a vision-based neural network architecture, which is fed by six cameras onboard.

Just like Optimus, Figure 02 can watch, learn, and master a task just through vision. As I highlighted in Outer Limits, it may take 10 hours of trial and error to get an individual task right. But once a task is learned, every Figure 02 has it mastered.

At the moment, Figure AI is the closest competition that Tesla has right now in autonomous humanoid robots. And it is already working on its next generation, Figure 03.

The next major development in this industry will be the announcement by Tesla of Optimus Gen 3. We got a hint of its capabilities at Tesla’s recent We, Robot event this October when it displayed Optimus Gen 3’s hand, an impressive robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom.

That might not seem like much, but a robotic hand with the kinds of fine motor skills that come naturally to us humans is the key to performing the kinds of human tasks that have immense utility.

We can expect to see the new and improved Optimus in less than six months, as the race continues to not only commercialize fully autonomous robots but to also scale production quickly to more than 1 million units a year.

It’s all accelerating. 2025 is going to be an extraordinary year.

And to all my U.S.-based subscribers, sending my best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving.

And to all my subscribers, I’m grateful to have you on board for this incredible ride we’re going to experience in the next few years.

Jeff