A lot has changed in the 16 months since I last stepped foot inside Figure's Sunnyvale headquarters. For starters, there's a sign hanging outside the company's nondescript Silicon Valley office building in a Silicon Valley office park. And there's no empty desk to be seen anywhere.
The robotics company now employs 130 engineers, according to CEO Brett Adcock, who met me at the company to get a closer look at its latest humanoid robot, Fig. 02. Next year, Fig. plans to use some of its $1.5 billion funding to move into new, bigger offices a short drive away.
The robots are lined up at the back of the space in various states of disassembly; there are even shelves crammed with dozens of arm and head parts. The silver figure, Figure 01, is on display. When I ask if I can take a photo of the robot, I'm jokingly told, “That's old news.”
Since my visit in May 2023, Figuure has opened a systems integration and testing department in its current space, which Adcock calls the “back side” but is actually more to the side, where many of the robot's parts are tested.
But the real highlight is smack dab in the middle of the main office space, where, away from the rows of desks, Figuure's engineers actually work with robots and test all sorts of real-world work scenarios. Right now, the focus is on car assembly, a direct result of the company's recent pilot project with BMW.
Earlier this year, the Figure Robot operated for a few weeks at the company's factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Adcock says the company's humanoids worked nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While moving packages is an important task, it's not the only one the company is currently working on. The Figure Robot is scheduled to return to the factory in January, this time for good. Adcock says the initial robot numbers will be in the mid- to high-single digits.
The automotive industry has proven to be the most enthusiastic about adopting the humanoid form factor, and that's not surprising: automakers have been deploying robots on factory floors for decades, and competitors Boston Dynamics, Aptronic and Sanctuary AI have all announced their own pilot projects with automakers.
And then, of course, there's Tesla's Optimus. Agility, meanwhile, is focused on consumer goods, running trials with Amazon and recently announced that its Digit robot has completed a testing phase in a Spanx factory.
Meanwhile, 1X recently revealed plans to target the home. Like Figure, the decade-old US/Norwegian company is well-funded, including backing from OpenAI. As we continued to walk through the space, Adcock pointed to a small section of the floor that had been allocated for testing the Figure 02 in a home-like setup.
Image credit: Brian Heater
[A Figure 01 unit on display at the company’s HQ]
But it's still very early days, both in terms of design and market. Above all, the price of these machines needs to come down significantly to target consumers. Adcock thinks the Figure can hit the sub-$20,000 price point, but certainly not this year. In the meantime, the company is testing the 02's effectiveness at helping out in the kitchen and getting chores done around the house.
The tour ended with a quick demo of the robot walking towards me while I filmed a video. They've come a long way in a short amount of time. Last time I was here the system wasn't walking at all; the figure was testing leg movement without a torso attached. The second-generation robot also looks quite different; it no longer has the exposed wiring and boards of the previous generation, and there's no longer a battery bag; it's completely contained within the torso, along with the Nvidia GPU and other processors.
In the video I shot, the robot is supported by a gantry system. The system deployed in South Carolina wasn't secured by cables, but for testing purposes, Adcock says it's much more efficient to run it in different applications while supporting weight.
Still, it's always educational to see such a system up close. Even if the robot video isn't heavily edited, remotely controlled, or otherwise tricked into doing anything, there's no real way to tell how many takes the robot will need to get the perfect shot. But the real test will begin when Figure's robots return to the BMW factory on January 1.