Humanoid Robot 2024 – Future Home Assistant

This blog is about humanoid robot 2024.

On the evening of August 6th, Beijing time, Figure AI, a well-known Silicon Valley embodied intelligence startup company invested by Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, unveiled its second-generation humanoid robot, Figure 02, which is the highest-performance humanoid robot 2024 launched by Figure AI to the market. Combining the flexibility of human form with advanced artificial intelligence, it can perform various commercial tasks and be applied to homes in the near future.

Compared to the first-generation robot, Figure 01, which was only released in March of this year, Figure 02 not only has a sleeker look but has also been redesigned in hardware and software, making progress in critical technologies such as AI, Computer Vision, batteries, electronic devices, sensors, and actuators. It’s a significant outcome of humanoid robot 2024.

Design breakthrough – The big progress of humanoid robot 2024

Appearance: Figure 02 is about 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighs about 70 kilograms, moves at a speed of 1.2 meters per second, and adopts an exoskeleton structure design, which means that the outer skin carries loads and stresses, and the robot’s power and arithmetic wiring will be placed inside the body. This humanoid robot 2024 integrated wiring design contributes to the robot’s reliability and package tightness, for which Figure AI re-customized the wire terminals and connectors.

Hand Design: A significant feature of Figure 02 is the configuration of the fourth-generation hand mechanism, the latest design with 16 degrees of freedom (DoF) and human-level load capacity, which allows it to carry up to 25 kilograms (55.1 pounds) of weight and dexterously perform a variety of human-like tasks, which explained humanoid robot 2024.

The fourth-generation hand device is similar to the shape of the human hand, with four fingers and an opposing thumb on each hand, aiming to manipulate anything that the hand can grasp. Each finger is driven by a unit integrated with sensors and motors. The wrist is another novel design that provides a range of motion similar to the human wrist while wrapping and wiring all power and sensor signal wires to the hand and fingers.

Intelligent Interaction: Supported by customized models trained in collaboration with OpenAI, Figure 02 can achieve voice interaction with humans through built-in microphones and speakers and perceive and reason through multi-camera and AI-driven visual systems. There are six onboard RGB cameras in front and back of its head and body, including two on its curved animation panel and a series of cameras on the back, which input information from the physical world into its AI-driven visual system.

A visual language model helps with semantic understanding and fast common sense visual reasoning. Compared with the previous generation of products, Figure 02’s end point onboard computing and AI inference capabilities have been tripled. Users can use Voice commands to give tasks to robots. Robots combine voice commands and camera data to understand, respond, and take corresponding actions, making AI tasks in the real world fully autonomous.

Battery capacity: The battery pack capacity of Figure 02 has also been upgraded with a 2.25 kWh battery pack, providing 50% more power than Figure 01. The official claims that its operating time is 5 hours, and eventually hopes to make it work for 20 hours a day.

Practical application – Important breakthroughs in Humanoid Robot 2024

Figure AI has begun applying its robotics technology to practical work environments. For example, Figure 02 has started working at BMW’s factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, USA. In the past few weeks, it has successfully inserted metal plate parts into specific fixtures, assembled them into part of the chassis and conducted AI data collection and use case training.

This humanoid robot has broad application prospects in factory and warehouse environments. Founder Ed Cocker envisions robots replacing humans with unsafe and undesirable tasks, building a more automated and efficient future where they can quickly learn and handle different tasks, which is attractive to businesses that need a flexible workforce. They can quickly learn and handle different tasks, which is highly attractive to enterprises that need flexible labour. With labour shortages growing in markets as diverse as manufacturing, warehousing, and healthcare, humanoid robots like Figure 02 could be one of the critical solutions to this problem.

Other players

In humanoid robots, Figure AI is not the only player. Many companies compete in this field, including 1X Robotics, Tesla, Agility Robotics, and Apptronik. Its competitors Agility Robotics’ humanoid robot Digit and Apptronik’s robot Apollo have been deployed to contract giant GXO Logistics to perform relatively simple tasks. Amazon is also testing Digit, and Mercedes-Benz is testing Apollo. In addition, Tesla plans to use its self-developed humanoid robot Optimus in its factory. In contrast, Boston Dynamics plans to test its latest version of the robot Atlas in Hyundai’s factory.

It is worth noting that Figure AI has established a strong partnership with OpenAI. This cooperation provides financial support for Figure and helps the company quickly test, verify, and iterate the voice interaction capabilities of robots. Musk is also optimistic about the development of humanoid robots and said that Tesla will become the leader in the field of humanoid robots. He also mentioned that its robot products may be as low as $10,000, far lower than the price of cars. If each unit is priced at $20,000, Tesla can profit $1 trillion per year.

Smart home

In addition to industrial applications, Figure hinted that its robots may soon enter the home field. It stated, “Figure’s robots combine the dexterity of human form with advanced AI technology, capable of performing a wide range of tasks in commercial applications and entering the home (environment) shortly.”

Robots are household helpers at home, trying to learn and perform tasks such as washing clothes, watering flowers, arranging flowers, and hanging clothes. In these scenarios, humanoid robots are no longer isolated technological entities but are closely intertwined with society and people’s lives. When you place it in a strange room, its cameras, sensors, and touch devices start working, keenly capturing and interpreting all surrounding information. It can quickly recognize every person and item in the room, follow your instructions to move forward, backwards, or grab items, and learn and imitate human actions such as opening and closing doors, picking up items, etc.

If such a robot can enter thousands of households in the future, it will serve us meticulously. Imagine it busy cooking for you in the kitchen, cleaning the room, gently caring for elderly family members or playing with children. What’s even more exciting is that it can perform many complex daily tasks and become an indispensable assistant in the family. This will undoubtedly be a great leap forward and a revolution in the quality of human life.

However, in the highly anticipated gaze, many difficulties still exist. Human movement ability is highly complex. A technology entrepreneur once pointed out that if a robot can be developed to skillfully tie shoelaces or take clothes out of the washing machine and gently unfold them, it will mark a massive breakthrough in technology. Regarding perception, cognition, and action, humanoid robots still have a large gap compared to human flexibility. To achieve a harmonious integration of robots and home life, the key is to create an intelligent living environment, such as smart speakers acting as the “ears” of the home, intelligent cameras acting as our “eyes”, and sweeping robots acting as the “hands and feet” of the house.

The Future

In the future, the monetization of humanoid robots is expected to accelerate further, and the market size is expected to achieve significant growth. According to Markets and Markets forecast, by 2027, the global humanoid robot market will reach $17.30 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 63.5%. At the same time, the humanoid robot industry chain will also further mature, including hardware manufacturing, software development, service operation, and other links, providing better support for the industry’s growth.If you want to know more about smart home, please click here.