Humanoid bot company Figure announces blockbuster partnership with BMW following amazing demo of bot autonomy.
Brett Adcock is CEO and founder of Figure, an AI Robotics company developing autonomous general purpose humanoid robots.
Figure will be fully hardware ready (actuators, sensors, perception and compute on board) in the first half of 2024 to do useful work. The hardware will be able to do everything a human can do.
They want to train the end to end neural net for more tasks. The training is one human with one robot.
It is then getting the AI trained to do the tasks with reliability.
The next step is to scale the number of bots.
Figure is using human reinforcement learning and human imitation learning.
There are large addressable markets for very structured and repetitive tasks like moving boxes.
The first step is performing the task as well as a human. This could be done slower than the human.
The next steps are to speed up the performance and increase reliability of performance.
Figure designed their own custom actuators. There are 31 structural actuators and 43 total actuators. There six different groups of actuators.
Figure has spent 19 months working on actuators and gone through multiple generations of design and fabrication. They have cost, production and reliability targets. The commercial off-the-shelf actuators are three times the mass and size.
On the hardware side, Figure is an actuator company. Figure can make new actuator designs in hours.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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