Figure and BMW have made a “commercial agreement” that will bring Figure’s first humanoid robot to a BMW factory in South Carolina. This is the only BMW building in the United States. As of 2019, the 8 million-square-foot site had the highest yield of any factory in the world that made cars for a German company.
BMW hasn’t said how many Figure 01 cars it will use at first. We also don’t know for sure what the robot will be doing when it starts working. Figure did confirm with TechCrunch, though, that it will start with five jobs and push them out one at a time.
A lot of people in the space have been using the term “general purpose” to describe these kinds of systems without giving them much thought. It’s important to set realistic standards and let people know that they will all come in as either single- or multi-purpose systems, learning new skills as they go. Figure CEO Brett Adcock likes the idea because it’s like an app shop, which is something Boston Dynamics already does with the Spot robot through the SDK.
Initial uses are likely to include common manufacturing tasks like moving boxes, pick-and-place, and unloading and loading pallets. These are the kinds of routine tasks that factory owners say are hard to keep human workers for. Adcock says Figure plans to ship its first business robot within a year. This is a tight deadline for a company that prides itself on getting things done quickly.
Figure’s early partners, such as BMW, will have a lot of say in the first group of apps. One thing that the method will probably work with at first is sheet metal. Adcock also says that the business has added more clients but wouldn’t say who they are. It looks like Figure will choose to announce each one separately instead, which will keep the news loop going for another year.
Figure, unlike some other humanoid makers, like Agility, is focused on making a hand that can be used like a human hand. The idea behind this kind of end effector is the same one that led many people to the humanoid form factor in the first place: our workspaces were made with us in mind. Adcock makes a reference to Figure 01 being given a first set of tasks that need a lot of skill.
The executive says that legs are just as important for getting around during certain jobs as, if not more so than, things like walking up and down stairs and over rough ground, which get most of the attention in these types of conversations.
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During training, a variety of methods will be used, such as reinforcement learning, simulations, and teleoperation to help the robot get out of any trouble it might get into. Figure 01 will also learn a lot on the job. Like humans, it will improve its method by testing it in the real world. Whether the systems will be long-term additions to the BMW line rests on how well the robots meet the output goals set by the car company itself. In the meantime, Figure is renting the systems through RaaS (robotics as a service), and it plans to keep doing this for a while.
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