Figure today announced a “commercial deal” that will bring its first humanoid robot to a BMW manufacturing facility in South Carolina. The Spartanburg plant is BMW’s only one in the United States. As of 2019, the 8 million square foot campus had the highest throughput among the German manufacturer’s plants anywhere in the world.
BMW has not revealed how many Figure 01 models it will use initially. Nor do we know exactly what tasks the robot will be assigned when it starts working. However, Figure confirmed with TechCrunch that it is starting with five initial jobs, which will be presented one at a time.
While people in the field throw around the term “general purpose” to describe these kinds of systems, it’s important to temper expectations and point out that they will all arrive as single- or multi-purpose systems, increasing their skills over time. next year . Figure CEO Brett Adcock likens the approach to an app store — something Boston Dynamics currently offers with its Spot robot via SDK.
Potential initial applications include standard manufacturing tasks such as moving boxes, picking and placing, and unloading and loading pallets — basically the kind of repetitive tasks that factory owners claim they struggle to retain. Adcock says Figure expects to ship its first commercial robot within a year, an ambitious timeline even for a company that prides itself on quick turnaround times.
The initial batch of applications will be largely determined by early Figure partners such as BMW. The system, for example, will likely run on sheet metal to begin with. Adcock adds that the company has signed up additional customers, but declined to reveal their names. It seems likely that Figure will choose to announce each one separately to keep the news cycle going in the intervening 12 months.
Unlike some other humanoid designers (including Agility), Figure focuses on creating a dexterous human-like hand for manipulation. The thinking behind such an end effector is the same that drives many to the humanoid form factor in the first place: That is, we’ve designed our workspaces with that in mind. Adcock hints that Figure 01 is tasked with an initial set of highly dexterous tasks.
As for the importance of the legs, the executive suggests that their importance for maneuvering during certain tasks is as important as – or more important – than things like walking up stairs and on uneven ground, which tend to be more loved during these of the conversations.
Training, meanwhile, will involve a combination of approaches, including reinforcement learning, simulation and teleoperation to help the robot escape potential entanglements. Figure 01 will learn a lot on the job, too, refining its approach during real-world testing, just like us humans. As for whether the systems will be long-term additions to the BMW lineup, that depends entirely on whether the robots are able to meet the automaker’s internal expectations for production. Meanwhile, Figure essentially leases the systems through RaaS (robotics as a service), a model it expects to maintain for the foreseeable future.
