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    Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

    (www.figure.ai)
    392 points lairv | 17 comments | 09 Oct 25 13:27 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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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    wongarsu ◴[09 Oct 25 16:22 UTC] No.45529839[source]▶
    The last example they show (pick up package from pile, put it label-down on conveyor, repeat) seems to be the most realistic. They even have an uncut video of their previous model doing that for an hour on twitter [1].

    I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot, but the ability to grab and manipulate all those packages and recover from failures is pretty good

    1: https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1931391783306678515

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    aDyslecticCrow ◴[09 Oct 25 21:00 UTC] No.45533035[source]▶
    > I'm not sure that task needs a humanoid robot

    An industrial robot arm with air powered suction cups would do the trick... https://bostondynamics.com/products/stretch/ ...

    ... So the task they work best at is the task there is already cheaper better robots specialized for.

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    1. 93po ◴[09 Oct 25 21:22 UTC] No.45533235[source]▶
    I think the use case here is smaller to medium size businesses that don't need a $150k suction robot arm 24/7, but do need 24/7 help with warehousing, packaging, restocking, taking inventory, sorting mailing, applying shipping labes, etc. With a single humanoid robot you can do all that for, at some point, possibly as low as $20k for a one-time robot purchase.
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    2. blackguardx ◴[09 Oct 25 21:51 UTC] No.45533479[source]▶
    Why do you think a humanoid robot will be cheaper than a robot arm?
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    3. xky ◴[09 Oct 25 23:04 UTC] No.45533944[source]▶
    If humanoid robots can perform ok on a broader set of tasks then they could reach economies of scale that a robot arm might not.
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    4. kevin_thibedeau ◴[09 Oct 25 23:23 UTC] No.45534054[source]▶
    > one-time robot purchase.

    With a hefty subscription to make it do anything useful.

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    5. aerostable_slug ◴[10 Oct 25 00:09 UTC] No.45534303{3}[source]▶
    To add to that, a good friend of mine is a welder and machinist (and still using Linux on the desktop years after I set him up). A robot 'helper' that just moves things around and maybe does basic machine work (cutting pipe and threading the ends, for example) would put his productivity through the roof. Same story with a guy who specializes in kitchen remodeling.

    It's hard to find decent general purpose help these days and they would pay good money for a halfway useful helper.

    Once it's able to weld... That's going to be a massive game changer, and I can see that coming 'round the corner right quickly.

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    6. numpad0 ◴[10 Oct 25 01:29 UTC] No.45534680{3}[source]▶
    There are couple UR5 single arm cobots on eBay at $5.5k each right at this moment. The truth is that the value of humanoid is in it form, the novelty, the sense of accomplishment, not features.
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    7. timschmidt ◴[10 Oct 25 01:30 UTC] No.45534685[source]▶
    I can already run the Qwen3 VL multimodal model for text, image processing, and speech recognition and generation on a well spec'd home workstation.

    And the Unitree R1 already only costs $6k.

    All the necessary pieces are aligning, very rapidly, and as James Burke has pointed out, that's when Connections happen.

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    8. phs318u ◴[10 Oct 25 02:05 UTC] No.45534819[source]▶
    With humans, we call that subscription a salary.
    9. 93po ◴[10 Oct 25 05:43 UTC] No.45535661[source]▶
    because they already are. an industrial arm from ABB is frequently over $100k. add in the cost to fit it with specialty equipment like vacuum suction for handling boxes, made by a small to medium size business, they'd probably charge another $50k. and if it breaks you need specialty mechanics and parts.

    in a world with 500 million humanoid robots, parts are plentiful, theyre easier to work on due to not weighing 5000 pounds, and like the other person said, economies of scale

    10. sneak ◴[10 Oct 25 06:41 UTC] No.45535961{4}[source]▶
    Once it’s able to weld and climb then building skyscrapers will become a lot easier and cheaper as you don’t need safety equipment for them.
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    11. serf ◴[10 Oct 25 06:49 UTC] No.45535999{3}[source]▶
    the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.

    what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.

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    12. timschmidt ◴[10 Oct 25 06:53 UTC] No.45536028{4}[source]▶
    > the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy

    Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.

    I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.

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    13. darkwater ◴[10 Oct 25 13:36 UTC] No.45538857{5}[source]▶
    Yeah, just let them fall on top on someone/something below!
    14. bchasknga ◴[10 Oct 25 15:46 UTC] No.45540281{5}[source]▶
    Your reasonable AI cannot resolve the fact that its arm can only lift 2KG.

    I am impressed by Unitree, but the problem that needs to be solved here is not just better software. Better hardware needs to come down in cost and weight to make the generalized robot argument more convincing.

    There is still a long way to go for a humanoid to be a reasonable product, and that's not just a software issue.

    15. metal_am ◴[10 Oct 25 16:26 UTC] No.45540714{4}[source]▶
    If you found one for that price with the controller and pendent, please send me a link. I’ve looked a lot and have not seen any UR for remotely that cheap.
    16. aDyslecticCrow ◴[10 Oct 25 17:29 UTC] No.45541492{3}[source]▶
    Why are you comparing LLMs with robotics? What makes you think they are even remotely related problem sets?
    17. spopejoy ◴[10 Oct 25 20:56 UTC] No.45543689[source]▶
    We're so far from that though. Even if we magically jump over the failure rates we're discussing here, the safety considerations seem to be far worse. These things are heavy and dangerous, c.f. Rodney Brooks' "never follow a robot up stairs" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/10/why-irobots-founder-wont-...