Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot

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.

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

> 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.

I feel like we're entering the era of general and inefficient solutions to problems.

Like LLMs being used to pick values out of JSON objects when jq would do the job 1000x more efficiently.

This is what this whole field feels like right now. Let's spend lots of time and energy to create a humanoid robot to do the things humans already decided humans were inefficient at and solved with specialised tools.

Like people saying "oh it can wash my dishes for me". Well, I haven't washed dishes in years, there's a thing called a dishwasher which does one thing and does it well.

"Oh it can do the vacuuming". We have robot vacuums which already do that.

Human form robots are a case of Jake of all trades and master of none. Sure I have a dishwasher thats more efficient at doing the job than me but I still end up doing dishes because the cast iron frying pan can't going in there without ruining the polymerised layer of oils that have been baked into it and i would have to repeatedly oil and reheat it and stink up the house with smoke reseasoning it afterwards, and I have hand wash the thermos and travel mugs, and dishwasher arent good for the sharp knives and etcetera etc etc... sure the rumba can vacume very efficiently but it suck at gating around furniture leg or gaps to small for a 14'' diameter circle to fit through so I have to vacume all of the bits it can't get to. Sure the a robot lawn mower can do my yard very efficiently but it cant move the childrens toys out of the grass or open the gate to the front yard or close the gate to keep the dogs from running out the gate once its open. Specialized tools suck at edge cases. Human form robots if they ever works (big if) can do all of the edge cases and take advantage of all the tools made for humans I already have to do all of the those other jobs.

The real question, is whether the humanoid robot will ever be cheaper than hiring immigrant labour. Because that's a pretty damn low threshold