Figure 01

What it is

Figure 01 is a bipedal humanoid robot introduced by the startup Figure on 2 March 2023, the day the company came out of stealth.^[1] According to Figure, the machine was designed to stand 5 ft 6 in tall, weigh 60 kg, carry a 20 kg payload and run for five hours.^[1] Those are design targets rather than measured results: when the first images and video were released, IEEE Spectrum noted that they were renderings of what the team wanted Figure 01 to be.^[1] The distinction is worth keeping for any robot launch — a specification sheet states an intention, and a rendering shows a design.

Where it came from

Figure said it had spent nine months assembling its team and designing the alpha build before the announcement.^[1] The team was reported as 40 experts with a combined 100 years of experience in AI and humanoid robotics, drawn from organisations including Google X, IHMC, Tesla, Apple, Cruise and Boston Dynamics.^[1] The list is a snapshot of where humanoid-robot talent was moving at the time: people who had worked on legged machines in research settings, on self-driving cars and on electric vehicles were converging on one startup. Nine months from team-building to an alpha design is a tight schedule for hardware.

What it was shown doing

In January 2024 Figure published a video in which Figure 01 made coffee using an end-to-end neural network; a report said the robot learned the task in 10 hours of training.^[3] "End-to-end" means the network is trained to go from what the robot senses to the movements it makes, instead of an engineer writing out every step of the coffee-making sequence by hand. A coffee task works as a demonstration because it chains many small coordinated movements together — finding the machine, inserting a pod, steadying a mug, pressing a button — and one failure breaks the whole thing.

The same month brought commercial news. On 18 January 2024 Figure announced a commercial agreement with BMW concerning the deployment of its humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing.^[2][3] TechCrunch reported that Figure confirmed an initial set of five tasks, to be rolled out one at a time at the carmaker.^[2] Naming a handful of tasks and adding them one by one turns "humanoid robots in a car factory" into a series of steps that can each be checked.

Where it sits

Figure's own site describes the second-generation Figure 02 as the successor product, with a height of 5 ft 6 in, a weight of 70 kg and a payload of 20 kg.^[4] Set against the figures given for Figure 01, the successor keeps the same height and payload and is heavier. Height, weight, payload and runtime are the numbers that come up again and again for humanoids because they broadly decide whether a machine can work in spaces built for people: a height close to an adult's lets it work at existing benches and stations, a 20 kg payload is what makes carrying parts or tools plausible, and five hours of running means working for a stretch without recharging. Whether such targets are met is a question for real production lines, not for launch specifications.

Between the March 2023 unveiling and the January 2024 manufacturing agreement there was less than a year.^[1][2][3] Figure 01's place in that story is as the first machine of a company that went from stealth to an automotive agreement quickly, and as the generation against which the later Figure 02 is defined.^[4]