Figure AI has revealed a new humanoid bot, the figure-03. They are targeting a total of 100,000 built within 4 years (by the end of 2029). They anticipate making $1000 per month or $12,000 per year. This would mean $1.2 billion per year from 100,000 bots.
The humanoid bots now wear clothes to make them easier to clean and maintain.
They show the usual tasks of moving boxes, folding clothes, sorting items and helping around the house.
Figure 03 is a complete redesign and shaved 9% off the mass and enhanced maneuverability in constrained environments like homes or factories.
First-gen production line will make up to 12,000 units/year, with in-house assembly of actuators, batteries, sensors, and electronics. Hybrid workforce includes Figure robots for tasks like component handling.
Supply chain (3+ dozen vendors) geared for 100,000 total robots (or 3M actuators) over the next four years (2025-2029). This implies a ramp: 12k in Year 1, accelerating to ~40k+ annually by 2029 via line expansions and robot-assisted manufacturing.
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Good for robots to do dirty, dangerous, and dull work. But the USA government needs money for Social Security, taxes, UBI, and so forth. How much should charge for domestic and industrial robots in taxes? That rolls into AAA’s comments and others about ROI. And Agilitybots, Teslabots, Unitreebots, and others from China and elsewhere – what of them? Factorys still come out ahead at $2k rent and $2k taxes per month. Can either lower cost of products or have more profits. The economy and social dynamics are changing faster than we prepare for. 2024, year of AI. 2025, year of agents. 2026, year of robots?
100k sounds a bit high, but depends where you live in. “The average fully-loaded cost for an employer to hire a production worker in the USA is typically between $60,000 and 85,000 per year. And he/she cant work 24 hours all days. So logic of getting robot is completely fine.
But there are some total hipster projects like: Moley Robotics and their robotic kitchen. Initial they projected costs of 20 – 30k per unit. Now it costs 100k – 400k per unit, they are not up front with pricing.
Who will spend 300k on home robotic kitchen if it is cheaper to order food and get it delivered to home. Better to hire chef. Perhaps some billionare who does not know what to do with the money.
“They anticipate making $1000 per month or $12,000 per year. This would mean $1.2 billion per year from 100,000 bots”
Well, this is their figure, so let’s trust it and run the numbers to keep things in perspective.
The $1000 per month is revenue. What are the costs and the profit?
If a robot costs 100k (VERY conservative figure given that the Spot robot from Boston Dynamics costs 75k USD in its base level configuration) and earns 12K a year, it has to work 24/7 for 9 years to generate 108K USD.
That is 8K IN PROFITS IN 9 YEARS,
And that is assuming absolutely no maintenance costs, energy costs, or insurance costs.
An aggregated 8% return on investment over 9 years is REALLY bad.
For comparison, if someone invests in 10-year treasuries that have a 2% average annual yield (quite below the nominal 4 -6 %), the compounded ROI after 9 years is 19.5% so 19.5k USD over your 100k initial investment (and you still get your 100k back, not a depreciating piece of machinery subject to wear and tear). If the investment has a 5% return (like higher-yield treasuries or an index that performs half as good as nasdaq) you get 55k.
Think quite well about these numbers before investing in the humanoid robots hype.
Agree!
I worry that they’re being far too cautious. The 100k bots in 4 years is scratching the surface of the potential market for early adopters and pilot projects. Tesla and Chinese competitors will be aiming to scale production much more quickly.
Of course, scaling is challenging and these are just the announced plans and they can expand their targets as they gain traction.
Yeah, that’s a massive fail on scaling. China, Tesla and a tonne of other fast following developers will eat their lunch if that’s their rollout schedule.
There will be 10’s of millions of robots in the field within 3 years.
Maybe they are sandbagging it. Obviously if they can produce 12,000 in year 1, they are capable of producing 120,000 in year 2 just by building 10 copies of the production process. Unlike most products, some fraction of the tasks in the production process could be done by the product itself. It might be better to scale up the production process by improving and making it more efficient before scaling it through copies, but it would be possible to do both at the same time – if the demand was there.
I think they are more realistic than the other players in this new field, both in terms of manufacturing and in real world use cases, including value for money.
As an end-user consumer product, cost-for-use will be limited to high net worth individuals for some time, and frankly, those people can afford human servants that do a better job with less oversight.
Ordinary consumers can buy simple devices, like a Roomba or an autonomous lawn mower, etc. to do simple, repetitive tasks better, even dishwashers (which are nearly 100-year old technology now), and for a lot less money.
I can’t think of a single use case that would make it worth keeping a life-sized robot needing space and lots of electric energy (which I pay for) in my modest NYC apartment.
Deliveries to the last foot, are rolling out – literally – in cities like Charlotte, NC, and elsewhere where sidewalks and streets are uniform enough to permit autonomous and enclosed delivery carts to roll from warehouse to customer house already (they do sometimes get stick in ditches, however, requiring company operators to come and free them. I don’t know what the rate of vandalism & other breakdowns are).
Factory robots are in place by the 10s of millions already, and do a better, more precise and faster job of building cars etc. Already, Tesla is 95% human-free in assembling its cars (the components offsite may require more human intervention, however), as reported by NBF recently.
There ARE use cases for the elderly or disabled, who may need cheaper and more available caretakers, but robots will have get stronger, much more reliable, and much better at edge case handling to be safely used there.
There may be use cases in space or Mars, Moon, etc. but these will also require custom made robots for each job and none of the Earth-bound robots are up to the complex and challenging environments of airless, extremely temperature-variable, worlds yet.