The cooperation between artificial intelligence robot company Figure and BMW has achieved a breakthrough! The efficiency of the Figure02 humanoid robot on the BMW production line has been significantly improved, with the speed increased by 400% and the success rate increased by an astonishing seven times. This marks a key step for humanoid robot technology in the field of industrial production, and also heralds the acceleration of factory automation in the future.
After a period of anticipation, the cooperation between artificial intelligence robot company Figure and German automobile giant BMW has finally made significant progress. The performance of the Figure02 humanoid robot on the production line has been significantly improved. The speed is now increased by 400%, and the success rate has increased by seven times.
Figure Corporation has released a new video demonstrating the power of Figure02. Figure founder and CEO Bred Adcock said the robot can complete up to 1,000 operations a day. “This number will continue to rise as we deploy more robots, collect more data and improve our AI models,” he mentioned.
In the video, the robot demonstrates its capabilities in a high-precision task that involves inserting a cumbersome piece of metal into a slot less than 1 centimeter wide. Adcock pointed out that this task is extremely challenging and requires the robot to have extremely high reliability when performing it.
In this process, the robot must grasp these difficult-to-handle metal parts and place them accurately at the designated location while avoiding collisions with metal fixtures. To meet the mission requirements, the operation's cycle time needed to be reduced by four minutes. "This task is ten times more difficult than any static table manipulation task we have demonstrated before," Adcock said.
The two parties began cooperating as early as the beginning of this year and successfully tested the humanoid robot at BMW's Spartonburg plant. This is also the first time BMW has used humanoid robots on its production line. Although BMW has stated that "there are no Figure AI robots at the Spartonburg factory and a timetable for introducing robots to the factory has not yet been determined," there are reports that the Figure humanoid robot will return to the BMW factory in January 2025.
Figure AI recently completed a $675 million Series B round of financing from investors including OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and Jeff Bezos. The California-based humanoid robot maker is currently valued at $2.6 billion. Adcock also mentioned that the current robot speed is far from reaching the maximum speed of the motor, and Figure expects to deploy more humanoid robots in real environments by 2025.
Highlight:
The speed of the Figure02 humanoid robot on the BMW production line increased by 400%, and the success rate increased by seven times.
The robot can complete up to 1,000 operations per day, and this number will continue to increase in the future.
Figure AI recently completed US$675 million in financing, with a valuation of US$2.6 billion.
The successful cooperation between Figure and BMW indicates that humanoid robots have broad application prospects in the field of industrial automation. In the future, more robots will be put into practical applications to further improve production efficiency. Figure AI’s high funding also shows investors’ confidence in the humanoid robot market.