Figure’s humanoid robot takes its first steps

Foward the rear?of the office, an engineer is working on a metal hand. It looks human enough — roughly the same size with four fingers and a thumb. The Figure team is methodically testing every piece of their robot skeleton before piecing them all together to watch the prototype take its first steps — something founder and CEO Brett Adcock promises is mere days away.

The hand is opening and closing — one of those tasks an engineer needs to perform ad nauseum before moving onto more complex things like mobile manipulation. “This is pretty new,” says Adcock. “We started the first five-finger wiggles last week.”

One finger in particular is getting the most action. The executive apologizes. “We had a customer in here yesterday, and we did a demo,” he explains. “It was doing that every single time, and we were like, ‘huh, that’s weird.’ It’s just flipping them off. Everybody.”

It’s best not to read too much into such things — certainly not at this early a stage. The startup is well-funded, bootstrapped with $100 million from the fortune Adcock amassed founding companies like employee marketplace Vettery and EVTOL maker Archer.?Figure?celebrates its one-year anniversary on May 20.

It’s made some impressive progress in that time. That’s due, in no small part, to Figure’s aggressive hiring. Many of its 51 staff members came from places like Boston Dynamics, Tesla and Apple. CTO Jerry Pratt was a research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition for 20 years.

The first two companies continue to loom large over the project. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is still very much the gold standard for humanoid robots. It’s pulled off extremely impressive stunts on video, and having spent some time with it at the company’s offices, I can attest to the fact that such activities are even more impressive in-person. That’s what a lot of smart people, DARPA funding and 30+ years of research will get you. The company’s work has always felt aspirational, and many former employees have gone on to help shape today’s robotics landscape.

But Atlas isn’t a product. It’s an ambitious research project — something its creators have made very clear from day one. That isn’t to say its breakthroughs won’t inform future projects (they undoubtedly will), but the company has said it has no intention of commercializing the robot. Boston Dynamics has entered the industrial robotics space, but there’s a reason it’s prioritized Spot and Stretch over a general-purpose humanoid robot.

“I think there’s been this lack for 10 years, ever since the [DARPA Robotics Challenge] and the [NASA Space Robotics Challenge],” says Adcock. “The only one that’s really been pushing on it has been Boston Dynamics. Tesla coming out and saying, ‘we’re gonna really take a serious look at this commercially,’ which Boston Dynamics has not been doing, has been really positive for the industry.

Whatever one thinks about Tesla’s ambitions (let’s just say I’ve heard very mixed things from well-positioned people in the industry),?Elon Musk’s August 2021 Optimus (née Tesla Bot) announcement?shook something loose in the industry. Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert summed things up well when he told me, “I thought that they’d gotten a lot more done than I expected, and they still have a long way to go.”

Optimus didn’t legitimize the notion of an all-purpose humanoid robot, exactly, but it forced a lot of hands. It’s a risky bet revealing such an ambitious product early in the development process, but in the subsequent months, we’ve come to know several more startups that have thrust their names into the category. We broke the news of Figure’s existence back in?September. In?March, the company made things official, coming out of stealth with some robot renders in hand.

Vancouver-based Sanctuary has been working on several iterations of its humanoid, including Phoenix, a 5’7”, 155-pound robot that was?unveiled earlier this week. The company has also been running limited pilots with partners. And then there’s 1X. The Norwegian firm?made headlines in March?with a $23.5 million Series A2, led by OpenAI. That the ChatGPT developer invested so much in a humanoid is a big vote of confidence in the future intersection between robots and generative AI.

The sudden propagation of competitors has caused some confusion, not helped by the fact that there seems to be a good deal of convergent evolution among product designs. One major news site recently ran a story headlined, “OpenAI and Figure develop terrifyingly creepy humanoid robots for the workforce,” confusing 1X for Figure, which continues to be the source of some annoyance. “Terrifyingly creepy,” meanwhile, is a fairly standard descriptor for robots from non-roboticists, perhaps pointing to a long road toward more mainstream acceptance.

What’s remarkable about the Figure office is how unremarkable it is from the outside. It’s a 30,000-square-foot space located amongst office parks in a relatively sparse part of Sunnyvale (insofar as anything in the South Bay can be meaningfully labeled “sparse”), located within a 10-, 15- and 20-minute drive of Meta, Google and Apple, respectively. It’s a long, white building, with no visible signage, owing to the permitting involved in adding such things.

Inside, it has that new office smell. There are still a number of empty desks, an indicator of future growth — though not nearly as aggressive as it experienced a year ago. “We’re hiring very carefully,” says Adcock. “We’ve scaled the team to about where we probably need to be. Our headcount is pretty strong for the size of the company. I don’t think we ever want to turn away the right person for the job.”