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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

(www.figure.ai)
392 points lairv | 4 comments | 09 Oct 25 13:27 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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HAL3000 ◴[09 Oct 25 14:59 UTC] No.45528648[source]▶
All of the examples in videos are cherry picked. Go ask anyone working on humanoid robots today, almost everything you see here, if repeated 10 times, will enter failure mode because the happy path is so narrow. There should really be benchmarks where you invite robots from different companies, ask them beforehand about their capabilities, and then create an environment that is within those capabilities but was not used in the training data, and you will see the real failure rate. These things are not ready for anything besides tech demos currently. Most of the training is done in simulations that approximate physics, and the rest is done manually by humans using joysticks (almost everything they do with hands). Failure rates are staggering.
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pizzathyme ◴[09 Oct 25 16:31 UTC] No.45529962[source]▶
How does this square with the video where they showed it running continuously for an hour doing an actual Amazon package sorting job? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkc2y0yb89U
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1. daveguy ◴[09 Oct 25 17:40 UTC] No.45530759[source]▶
Is it really sorting? All I see is the humanoid robot moving similarly shaped / sized packages from one conveyor belt to a platform to another conveyor belt. A little industrial automation design would be much more effective, cheaper, and faster compared to the task it is performing.
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2. flutas ◴[09 Oct 25 17:57 UTC] No.45530956[source]▶
Plus it's missing the large stack of packages already in the corner that...seems like they will forever be stuck there.
3. yorwba ◴[09 Oct 25 21:12 UTC] No.45533149[source]▶
The actual sorting is typically automated with scanners reading the labels and shunting packages from one conveyor belt onto another, basically a physical sorting network.

Tasks left for human "sorters" to do are:

- put packages on conveyor belt so the scanner can read the label (as done by the robot in the video)

- deal with damaged or unreadable packages that can't be processed automatically

- when a package gets jammed and forces the conveyor belt to stop, remove the offending package before restarting

- receive packages at the other end and load them into vehicles

Generally the difficulty with all of these is dealing with variability and humans act as variability absorbers so the machines can operate smoothly.

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4. ACCount37 ◴[09 Oct 25 23:40 UTC] No.45534136[source]▶
Which is why robots that can also absorb variability in the same way humans do would be so valuable.