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Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

(www.figure.ai)
392 points lairv | 1 comments | 09 Oct 25 13:27 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cooper_ganglia ◴[09 Oct 25 17:52 UTC] No.45530893[source]▶
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.

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paxys ◴[09 Oct 25 18:55 UTC] No.45531624[source]▶
> 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.

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cooper_ganglia ◴[09 Oct 25 19:22 UTC] No.45531960[source]▶

  >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.

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1. hadlock ◴[09 Oct 25 20:06 UTC] No.45532420[source]▶
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