Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

Crazy to me how negative the comments are here. None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago. Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

The frog boils quickly.

>> Now, we're demoing consumer-facing robotics that will soon, within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

Turns out they're either insanely expensive or they just can't actually learn on the fly and do tasks. This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt but never in a cluttered room or taken from a pile of laundry.

I figured the first AI robots would be pets, but apparently they're aren't even that good yet. Furby level isn't going to cut it.

  >This is the Nth time I've seen a robot folding a shirt

This is precisely what I mean. These systems aren't perfect, and won't be widely usable in the home for several more years, but this is the worst they'll ever be! This is the first glimpse of a future without the need of physical human labor, for better or worse.

We're watching robots intelligently find a shirt, figure out how to fold it relative to its position, and then parse all that data, tokenizing both vision + text instructions into actionable movements that actually result in the physical world being affected!

All this, and people are criticizing it's manufacturing cost or ability to do things it hasn't been explicitly trained to do in 2025. I see these things and don't think about 2025, I'm thinking about 2040 and the inevitable future we're diving into.

> None of this was even remotely possible less than 5 years ago.

Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

I'm not saying one shouldn't be hopeful, but it's also not hard to see why people here are generally more conservative about the near future.

There are actually thousands of Spots out in the world, mostly doing industrial inspections, now.

Humanoid robotics has been picking up pace the past couple of years. The hardware and the software has gotten much better very recently. Progress is not linear. You can see this in Atlas itself.

  >Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots (not cherry-picked ads) for ~20 years now. Not a single one has graduated to any mass market real world use case.

Good point, which is why Boston Dynamics didn't really excite me. It was very cool to see the bot balance itself while being pushed with a hockey stick, but LiDAR-based pathfinding on hydraulic actuators has never truly felt like the future. Balancing and doing backflips is different than walking through a home and being able to perform delicate or visually difficult tasks like loading a dishwasher or caring for your baby in it's crib at night (just kidding, lol)

I'm sure a lot of BD's initial R&D has made Figure able to ramp so quickly and I don't mean to speak negatively of BD at all, but within 3 years, Figure has made it feel like the future is at our doorstep, meanwhile BD hasn't really done that for me in 3 decades. That's very impressive to me.

Building on the shoulders of giants. Not long ago this smaller form factor battery powered electric robot wouldn't have been possible. The necessary tech for the software is only just starting to work. Post-2024 Atlas is also very impressive.

This is quite loosely stated. It's true Boston Dynamics is an old company and that they've had some very cool demos. It's not at all true that they've been showing qualitatively similar things for 20 years.

The oldest video on their YouTube channel is 16 years old, and is of a quadrupedal robot not falling over while inching along tricky surfaces.

You never know how soon or how many iterations until after the goal has been achieved. Sometimes something like the smartphone explodes relatively quickly after the concept starts coming together. Other times you're waiting decades upon decades to turn the corner, like with fusion power.

Humanoid robots have fallen into the latter category for too long for most people to jump at each advancement being "the one" anymore. Afterwards, everyone will agree it was obvious ${ADVANCEMENT} was really the one which would do it - but not before.

> Boston Dynamics has been releasing actual product demos of such robots

Boston Dynamics hasn't released any actual products. They seem to be focused on flashy demos of robots dancing instead of end user products.

As a counterpoint, Unitree right now sells humanoids you can actually buy. They're no where near as good, but you can actually use them.

One of the really big things that nobody talks about is the invention of the "mit cheetah actuator" which was invented in (well, the paper was published) in 2017, and commercial copies became freely availble in ~2020 online for about $350-400. Xaiomi and other companies now manufacture improved, updated actuators. They are roughly shaped like a hockey puck 1.5-2.5x upscaled. These are 1) very high torque for their size and weight and 2) offer "springback" similar to human joints. Not very useful for industrial welding machines putting cars together, but for walking robots, it reduces instantaneous strain and literally puts a "spring" in their step. This allowed robots to go from being stepper motor driven (which are huge, heavy), to much more compact, which greatly improves performance, battery life, and they can actually fit in human homes etc etc

They do sell Spot, actually

Also worth noting that Hyundai acquired Boston Dynamics in 2021, which I would expect to have been motivated by some sort of plan for productization and mass production.

> within a couple iterations, be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

There goes all those plumbing jobs that we, the white collar, were told we should be doing after LLMs take our jobs.

edit: typo

BD up until very recently only focused on hydraulics were which were extremely loud, expensive, bulky, and expensive to maintain. It was basically impossible to find a use case for such a thing that didn't have to cohabitate in spaces with humans. They also lacked the modeling for it to do much of anything other than walk, and even then recent advances in ML have in only a couple of years massively outperformed their in-house attempts that took 20.

BD was a money-burning machine that suckled off the teat of the miltiary industrial complex, where billions of dollars can be casually lost and there's no accountability and no one notices its gone. Their tech was cool, though, and their engineers did awesome work.

True, though very few (this says "over 1,500"[1]). And from everything I've seen, Spot appears to be a very expensive solution in search of a problem.

They also have Handle, a slow moving robot on wheels with an arm for moving boxes. No idea how many have been sold, but it seems to be even less than Spot.

[1] https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/

Plumbing is one of the most high-dexterity, non-generalizing jobs I can think of.

If it's a robot demo, I assume it's partly or even entirely fake. There are exceptions, of course, like Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics is very good at the mechanical part of robotics. They only start recently to take a look at integrating more autonomy and long term decision making.

Welcome to HN. :)

Do you honestly believe most people would let one of these in to their house ?

Crazy how you are falling for this silly hype. It's so clear the videos are cherry picked

> be able to perform most of your household tasks without issue.

Nice, we'll be able to work on more day for our overlords! rejoice!

I think the point is that we all want a robot to do the laundry and pack the dishwasher, but basically no one wants to be greeted by a robot when they arrive at a hotel.

They are selling it the way AI has been sold. This will replace everyone's jobs. Thing is everyone is tired now, so many pointless layoffs, massive bubble, "AI-First"-desperate-ass companies.

Who will buy the robots if we are all unemployed?

I'd love to be greeted by a robot when arriving at a hotel. Of course there's the novelty factor, but even without that, self-checkouts show that many people prefer interacting with a machine over a human for service.

More importantly, who wants to stand behind a desk 8 hours a day and handle fussy customers? Probably some people, but the main motivation for the average hotel clerk is receiving money. Can we reorganize the economy so robots perform this kind of mundane work, while humans still receive money but can spend their time on more meaningful activities than standing behind a desk? I think a future like that is possible although it remains to be seen whether we will get it.

> Crazy to me how negative the comments are here.

The truth hurts. Humanoid robots are getting better designs and currently do have extraordinary capabilities. Thing is, they're all cherry picked demos from carefully crafted test scenarios.

Until these things are thoroughly proven IRL with random tasks thrown at them then we can talk about negative comments. Until then its all marketing BS.

Maybe we live in different worlds, but I don’t know anyone who is especially happy when they get AI support rather than a human.

Services roles that are high contact / human interaction should have a human to deal with.