Umanoidul lui Figure merge deja și îndeplinește sarcini autonome

Vineri, 20 Octombrie 2023 15:32

The Figure 01 prototype's hip and knee joints each put out over 200 Nm of electric torque

After just 12 months of development, Figure has released video footage of its humanoid robot walking – and it's looking pretty sprightly compared to its commercial competition. It's our first look at a prototype that should be doing useful work within months.

Figure is taking a bluntly pragmatic approach to humanoid robotics. It doesn't care about running, jumping, or doing backflips; its robot is designed to get to work and make itself useful as quickly as possible, starting with easy jobs involving moving things around in a warehouse-type environment, and then expanding its abilities to take over more and more tasks.

Staffed by a group of some 60-odd humanoid and AI industry veterans that founder Brett Adcock lured away from leading companies like Boston Dynamics, Google Deepmind, Tesla and Apple, Figure is hitting the general-purpose robot worker space with the same breakneck speed that Adcock's former company Archer did when it arrived late to the eVTOL party.

Check out the video below, showing "dynamic bipedal walking," which the team achieved in less than 12 months. Adcock believes that's a record for a brand new humanoid initiative.

It's a short video, but the Figure prototype moves relatively quickly and smoothly, compared to the somewhat unsteadier-looking gait demonstrated by Tesla's Optimus prototype back in May.

And while Figure's not yet ready to release video, Adcock tells us it's doing plenty of other things too; picking things up, moving them around and navigating the world, all autonomously, but not all at the same time as yet.

The team's goal is to show this prototype doing useful work by the end of the year, and Adcock is confident that they'll get there. We caught up with him for a video chat, and what follows below is an edited transcript.

Looks a bit quicker than a lot of the competition.

Yep. Looks pretty smooth too. So yeah, it's pretty good, right? It's probably some of the best walking I've seen out of some of the humanoids. Obviously Boston Dynamics has done a great job on the non-commercial research side – like PETMAN, that's probably the best humanoid walking gait of all time.

That was the military looking thing, right?

Yeah, someone dressed him up in a gas mask.

He had some swagger, that guy! Are your leg motors and whatnot sufficient to start getting it running at some point, jumping, that sort of stuff? I know that's not really in your wheelhouse.

We don't want to do that stuff. We don't want to jump and do parkour and backflips and box jumps. Like, normal humans don't do that. We just want to do human work.

Thanks to Figure's Brett Adcock and Lee Randaccio for their assistance with this story.

Source: Figure