A 5’6″ 154-pound worker walks around BMW’s Spartanburg, South Carolina production plant. It places car parts in the right place and self-corrects its mistakes. It can also speak and respond to coworkers.
However, the worker is not a human being — it’s a shiny new human-like robot called Figure 02.
The bipedal machine was released on Tuesday by Figure AI, a $2.6 billion robotics startup backed by big names in robotics and AI like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Figure AI claims that Figure 02 is the most advanced humanoid robot currently on the market. The startup designed the robot with the advantages of the human form in mind, giving the machine human-scale hands with human-equivalent strength. The robot can pick up objects as heavy as 55 pounds, coordinate both of its hands and put parts in place accurately, down to the millimeter.
Figure 02 also walks on two legs, speaks with enhanced voice communication, and has AI-driven sight with six sensors.
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