Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

I don't understand why this even has to charge at all. It makes sense for multiple reasons to give it 3 batteries that say have 1/3 of the capacity, and make at least 1, if not 2 or 3 capable of charging independently on a station.

Then the robot would just go to its station and swap its own batteries. Why even have wireless charging at all? Or even a cable? Or even have it "charge"? Battery swapping seems to make way more sense here. Am I missing something?

Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation and can order its own replacement batteries, take them out of the box, and ship the old ones to a recycling facility...

More bonus points if the charging station is actually outside under a 1KW solar array pergola thing, that way you don't even have to pay for the electricity either. Don't worry, the robot will lock the door when it goes out to grab its batteries. It'll also bring in the whole setup if the weather isn't great.

Swapping requires a lot more moving parts and an additional enclosure to house the battery, and the batteries need to be much more rugged, and now you need two of them.

But a cable is a fair question.. you'd think it could plug itself in...

Maybe that's a hint at the robots actual capabilities at this point... or, they didn't want to bet on the unpredictability of environments: what if there's something in the way of the cable, though something could also be in the way of the inductive charger

I believe Elon has said before re:Tesla factory that plugging in cords is one of the hardest things to automate.

I'd appreciate a link. But "we don't trust our robot to be able to locate a power outlet and plug its own charging cord in there" sure is a low confidence play.

There are practical advantages to being able to charge wirelessly, sure. But if they're doing that because of AI limitations? Bad sign.

Tesla showed a prototype of a "snake"/"tentacle" charger that would find its own way to the Tesla's charging port a long time ago. Gotta be 5+ years by now. To my knowledge it has never become a real product or certainly not mainstream among Tesla owners. I believe this gives some credence to Tesla struggling to build robots that can plug a cord in, even in cases where the robot is the cable.

It’s too bad there isn’t some kind of liquid battery which you could just quickly top off at refueling stations with virtually zero downtime.

Yes, like gasoline. But still batteries. Maybe some kind of bearing sized batteries which can be poured like a fluid?

> can order its own replacement batteries, yeah companies would love to exploit this kind of subscription and definitely agree on battery swapping capabilities, it's more efficient .

> Bonus points if the robot has data on the degradation BMS that can tell battery health is common so this should be there.

It depends on the battery life. If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense. Creating a removable battery pack adds extra weight and gives the designers less freedom to place the battery pack exactly where it needs to be in the robot frame, or distribute the cells across the frame in strategic locations.

Also, the charge rate matters. If robot can charge to 80% in say 30 minutes, then it can take small charging breaks during the day between critical tasks.

Also, if the feet have inductive chargers, it's possible to place the robot on a large charging mat that allows it to run indefinitely, like in a factory environment. If your robot takes 30 minutes to fold the laundry or do dishes, why not place a charging mat at these locations so it can work and charge at the same time.

In the future, new homes might include charging coils embedded in the floor every 12 inches so that your robots can work all day.

You are describing a fuel cell battery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

Well established and even commercialized (Toyota sells fuel cell cars today IIRC), just not as cost effective in cars from a full infrastructure perspective (fueling specifically).

The most likely reason is that even doing a pre-programmed battery swap with consistent battery and slots is way beyond the capabilities. It also can't even plug itself in to charge.

Yet, it's being sold as capable of doing and folding your laundry.

I would sell th stock to the next idiot the moment they announced this.

Almost all of those points are applicable for the battery pack as well. There should be virtually no weight difference, other than the design limitation which is a valid concern.

The Walker S2 seems to handle it in the demo: https://www.ubtrobot.com/en/humanoid/products/WalkerS2

I suppose an external battery pack adds the bonus of doing a hard shutdown, in the case it decides to go rogue. Though getting to the battery pack might be hard if it resists you.

Yeah so in 2-4 years you can throw out your whole expensive robot because battery wears out? I hate this argument that just to be a bit thinner, the whole device has to be be made throwaway.

Yeah, immediately after I wrote that I thought now you need a rugged socket, and to mount the cable somewhere on a wall.. and where to even place it on the body that it's easy for it to plug in.. the belly button?

There is empty space in the feet anyway for a coil and a wire..

My Roomba could do it in 2007. Then, in 2015, Tesla tried and gave up.

Talking about the thinness of a humanoid, maid robot is pretty hilarious.

Humanoid "maid" robots will never be popular in the home until they can effectively simulate the appearance and form factor of a woman or teenage girl. It is what it is.

> If the robot lasts all day, then charging at night via standing on a charging pad makes a lot of sense.

If your employees are robots why would you be shutting down at night?

They're building cars, so it's more like ATX 24pin style cables, but this is generally true. Cables, wires, ropes type of objects are like cardboard thin robots with hundred joints in series and under someone else's control, so it's hard for robots to deal with. If you think about it, people hate cables too. We easily get tangled in headphone cables when they're wired, and we fail to coil or untangle Ethernet cables properly all the time.

EV charger style of short, thick cables should not be THAT hard, though. The more likely problem here is that they just can't handle the task of securing and inserting the head of the cable against resistance.

https://www.figure.ai/figure says 5 hour battery life. No mention of charge rate.

I think they might mean something closer to a flow battery, where, in principle, you should just be able to replace the electrolytes in a discharged state with new electrolytes in a charged state. Current flow batteries have very low energy density, though.

I've always been partial to fuel cells, and in some ways they're ahead of the curve relative to standard batteries. For instance, solid electrolytes have been a thing for a while in fuel cells, and in both flavors of exchange. The challenge has always been overcoming sluggish kinetics with either better catalysts, or heat. It makes me wonder if there's a useful solid state battery that runs hotter than typical batteries, that would be useful for hybrid automotive applications.

What happens if it can't get to the charger in time to do the swap? Same problem roombas have where you have to fish them out from under your couch, except now the damn thing is 5 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds.

I wasn’t describing that, I was describing individual batteries which are small enough to be effectively liquid in aggregate.

Bollocks. I wouldn’t care if it looked like Chewbacca if it did the household chores, had a good warranty and was repairable, and cost under $30k.

I’m not f##king the robot maid, I don’t care if it looks like a girl. If I was into that, there are other types of ‘robots’ for that.

Forget sockets. My $15 fitness band uses a magnetically-assisted pogo-pin type thing. Works great. Just blow that up to 5x to get nice fat conductors. All you need to do is get it close and it plugs itself in. Knock it off perpendicularly to disconnect.

Surely if the cable design was under your control, you could make it a lot easier for an automated system to plug in. Have it be sort of like a TRS jack, but cone-shaped. Then you don't have to get it perfectly aligned, it will align itself when inserted. Put a magnet in the tip to hold it in place, or some sort of electrically actuated lock that the robot can unlock when it wants to unplug the cable

I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, wants to fuck their robot maid, I'm saying thousands of years of patriarchy, hundreds of years of popular culture, fetishization of domestic labor roles and simple human nature will have an influence on the adoption of humanoid domestic robots that companies ignore at their peril.

Some people are Honda Civic people, only concerned with utility - that's fine, I'm the same way. But the money comes from cars designed to evoke eroticism or animal aggression. The humanoid robot in the article is, aesthetically speaking, horrifying to most people. It doesn't even have a face, it doesn't look pleasant, it doesn't invite an emotional bond, it isn't friend shaped, and that isn't what most people will want, or would spend money on, regardless of how efficient it is.

Humanoid robots will have a context within the same gender and cultural dynamics as human beings, by virtue of looking and acting human enough. People already have relationships with AI, and that will only become more normalized over time. Most people will personify and anthropomorphize humanoid robots just as much as they do AI, and this will be necessary for their popular acceptance and adoption. And yes, many people will want to fuck them, or at the very least, want them to look fuckable.

That seems like more of a reversal of causation. Women are more likely to be maids or home care workers because "domestic" work is perceived as women's work. Maids are often young women, "teenage girls" as you say, or older women because they either haven't started a family yet or have already raised their children to adulthood. This is because many women are expected to take on the majority of unpaid domestic labor while men take on the traditional wage-earning paid labor.

The sexualization of young women working domestic labor is the result of the general sexualization of most young women in most contexts. It isn't that domestic labor is some sort of pretext to get a young woman into the home. It is that once they are there, men sexualize them.

People do that with phones. Given that humanoid robots are very early in their development cycle why wouldn't they need to be replaced physically?

Joints will need replacement, lubrication, other maintenance. Same with motors, so why not replacing power/battery as part of a part?

It's not about making them "thinner". The idea is that they are human sized, because they're designed to operate in human occupied areas.

The first places are going to be like Amazon warehouses doing pick and pack because of the speed and all the variations of boxes and packages.

That's a relatively controlled environment, they'll evolve from there.

People already buy robot vacuums to do a decent job of vacuuming a decent amount of their floors. It is a $4.48 billion industry. Roombas don't look like people. They don't even look like pets or animals. They look like big hockey pucks. I have one and I have it run as soon as I leave for work because I don't want to interact with it, I want to have clean floors. If there was a robot that could fold clothes, load and unload the dishwasher, dust, and general purpose clean, I would have it run when I wasn't home too and would prefer if it folded up into a little box in the corner when I was home.

Roomba uses AI in some of their models, but people aren't trying to have a relationship with them. Because it is AI to serve a utilitarian purpose that does not involve imitating human behavior. People have relationships with chatbots because they are specifically imitating human behavior. Putting googly eyes on your Roomba isn’t the same as falling in love with a chatbot.

Cars are very very publicly visible, so they are used to project some sort of image to others; like the clothes people wear. Most people don't wear clothes or drive cars for purely utilitarian purposes. Often people will buy clothes or cars that look utilitarian to project an image about themselves. People buy furniture and decorate their homes to project an image. People do not buy their water heater to project a certain image about themselves. Robot vacuums are frustrating to watch. They get the job done in the end (most of the time) but their random zig zags or difficulty navigating around objects is something most people don’t want to see. They just want the result. Huminoid robots will be like that for a significant amount of time, where they can empty the dishwasher, but it will be painfully slow, odd looking, and very unhuman-like. People won’t want to see this but they will want the job done so they don’t have to do it. A robot that can perform utilitarian household chores would be a huge industry and would be used by most people like a dishwasher or water heater, primarily for its utility.

A robot that reaches the level that it could be a companion, operating visibly with/around people (bringing you and your guests refreshments rather than slowly, awkwardly folding clothes alone in a bedroom while you are at work or downstairs watching a movie) would very likely have a huge pressure to fit cultural and gender dynamics.