Figure today announced a “commercial agreement” that will bring its first humanoid robot to BMW’s manufacturing facility in South Carolina. The Spartanburg plant is BMW’s only plant in the United States. As of 2019, the 8 million square foot campus boasts the highest productivity among the German manufacturer’s factories anywhere in the world.
BMW has not revealed how many Model 01 variants it will initially publish. We also do not know specifically what jobs the robot will be assigned when it starts working. However, the mod confirmed with TechCrunch that it starts with five initial missions, which will be rolled out one after the other.
While people in the field have cavalierly thrown around the term “general purpose” to describe these types of systems, it is important to temper expectations and point out that they will all arrive as single- or multi-purpose systems, growing their skills over time. . Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure, likens this approach to an app store, which is what Boston Dynamics currently offers with its Spot bot via the SDK.
Potential initial applications include standard manufacturing tasks, such as moving boxes, picking and placing, and unloading and loading pallets — essentially the kind of repetitive tasks that factory owners claim they have difficulty retaining human workers for. Adcock says Figure expects to ship its first commercial robot within a year, an ambitious timeline even for a company that prides itself on fast delivery times.
The initial batch of orders will be largely determined by early format partners such as BMW. For example, the system will likely work with sheet metal to start. Adcock adds that the company has signed up additional clients, but refuses to reveal their names. It seems likely that the format will instead choose to announce each individually to keep the news cycle going over the intervening 12 months.
Unlike some other humanoid designers (including Agility), Shape focuses on creating a dexterous, human-like hand for manipulation. The thinking behind such an end-effector is the same that drives many toward the humanoid form factor in the first place: that is, we designed our workspaces with us in mind. Adcock points out that Figure 01 was assigned an initial set of functions that required great dexterity.
As for the importance of legs, the executive suggests that their importance for maneuvering during certain tasks is just as important — or more so — than things like climbing stairs and uneven terrain, which tend to get the most love during these conversations.
Meanwhile, the training will involve a mix of methods, including reinforcement learning, simulation and remote operations, to help the robot get out of potential bottlenecks. Figure 01 will learn a lot on the job as well, and will improve its approach during real-world testing, just like we humans do. As for whether the systems will be long-term additions to the BMW line-up, that depends entirely on whether the robots are able to meet the automaker’s internal expectations regarding production. Meanwhile, Viger is effectively renting out systems through RaaS (robotics as a service), a model it expects to maintain for the foreseeable future.