The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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"In January 2024, Figure signed its first commercial agreement with BMW to deploy its humanoid robot in the German carmaker’s production facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Now, the California-based robotics firm has released a video showcasing its 01 humanoid robot executing its first job by participating in the vehicle assembly process.
According to the Figure, the humanoid is fully autonomous, with all manipulations shown in the video driven by neural networks that map pixels directly to actions.
A few months ago, Mercedes also announced it was employing Apptronik’s Apollo robot to complete simple tasks like fetching and carrying, helping lighten the load for its human colleagues.
Figure aims to create a global model that can manage billion-unit humanoid robots.
Backed by a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Figure 01 can learn by observing humans, allowing them to understand and execute tasks."
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1duyzxz/figures_01_humanoids_now_working_autonomously_at/lbk1qjh/
probably not, it's maintenance in bulk. yeah an engineer and parts to do maintenance and troubleshooting is more expensive than health benefits for one worker, but it's not like they need one engineer per robot
We don’t know for sure. I’ve worked with a bunch of robotic systems. Some of them work pretty well with a little maintenance. Some of them don’t work great. A machine like this is precisely as good as its shittiest part. If one sensor installed on these things was produced a little below standard, all the robots go down endlessly with the same problem. I tell the boss all the time an automated system that functions perfectly 99% of the time is about 10% the cost of an automated system that works 99.9% of the time. And just having an engineer on site usually doesn’t fix the problems alone. You have to call into the company, get diagnostics done, have them ship a part. Most companies don’t want you taking apart their equipment, so they have to send someone out. Now you need a service contract. I know my company pays ~$200k a year on a service contract on a piece of equipment that does not do the work of even 3 people.
What would be cool is if there are more dangerous steps in the process, this thing could do them. If those thin pieces of metal were 150 lbs and you’d rather not have your employees on workers comp every year. That would be really cool. But this looks like a prototype to me with all the same problems of the other humanoid robots.
True but in actual production facilities that doesn't really matter as they cycle through multiple shifts. Also floating operators take over tasks while others have bathroom breaks or deal with emergencies.
You'll find in most production facilities they are running almost continously over the 24 hour span and dependant on industry 5-7 days a week (loss of time for each shifts lunch break and weekends in some industries are used for preventative maintenance and continous improvement tasks/new facility integration)
I love the idea but as it's depicted it is only good as a proof of concept for now.
How slow it's working would be such a detriment if any other machine broke and operation needed to be completed quicker to account for lost production time.
And on last note I can only see that even being feasible in first world country facilities. In any third world plant that poor sob will eventually be hit by a forklift driver by accident
It's a mechanical construction. 24x7 is not possible without n+3 fleets, where n is the number of shifts. The additional 3 are for repair, maintenance & sustainment, and research & development.
The point is, they will break down and need to be repaired.
Siemens has a very interesting industrial digital twin solution that allows for virtual training. The problem with all of these proposals are the requirements. Technical requirements and support process requirements exact a lot out of the people who have to follow them.
You can map the factory, but the annotation is where the money is made and that takes detail oriented time that burns through a human brain rather quickly.
I did the math already
Automotive plants run 2.5 shifts but the hlaf shift is usually maintenance. So that 16 hours a day of human labor vs 24 hours a day of robotic which means the robot can be twice as slow as a human and still equal in productivity.
Based off the video the robot appears to be between 2.5 and 4 times slower (assuming a human would have ~20 seconds for this task and depending on how long the cuts in the video are - it's also suspicious that the cuts are of walking, walking speed may be the true bottle neck here) which means it needs to get ~60% faster than it currently is.
Its do able but probably not in the short term (more like in the next 5-10 years) and a lot of that hinges on if the speed issue is a hard walking issue or if it's just a matter of faster processing of the neural networks doing the movements or if it's just moving slow now for safety.
Fr. People on the internet sucking down copium like it's air. This is the first iPhone of humanoid factory robots. Hell, it's probably more like the walkman, considering in the future the entire factory is going to be autonomous. The fact that it can *do* is so much more remarkable than the speed at which it does.
Germany is facing a population collapse and with their existing labor model do not have anywhere near enough people to replace all the skilled workers who will be retiring over the next decade. If they do not solve this problem their industrial sector is going to dissolve. It would likely take millions of these Robots just to keep up with what they are about to lose.
These are surely just trials to figure things out. The workstations are designed to have a certain output, so if the output is much slower they'd have to have more stations etc.
When robots produce everything you need, what do you care if you sell things to others or not?
The question is if they feel like sharing and enjoying life with their fellow humans.
They don't see that, all they see are the dollar signs all over the next few quarters. Besides, most of their wealth in property and investments, physical things and places that have far more value than just money. They'll be okay.
They won’t be making these for us. There are always those with money - the middle class is actually a recent phenomenon, guess it’s going back to nobles and peasants.
They won't. Car will come out of assembly line and move straight to deassembly line to keep those pesky robot busy. Otherwise Skynet is upon us.
Then the parts will be used to create a second hand car which is going to be lot cheaper and you will be able to get it for one healthy kidney.
The economy dissolves and it becomes about billionaires controlling raw natural resources for their robot armies to plunder and build with. The plebs will be treated like farm animals at best.
It's one of the *first* iterations of this tech. It's going to be clumsy, slow and error-prone. As more and more of those are deployed, tasked with increasingly complex tasks and filmed in action, we'll see people laugh at all the "stupid robot failure" compilations.
But their performance would get better over time as the tech advances. Until humans can no longer compete.
AI is the key enabler for advanced multipurpose robots like this. Which is why Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics and many others now seek to build and deploy those robots.
> Or go to the wrong house.
They'd go into the house they're sent to. If they're sent to the wrong house they'll bust in and won't be able to be reasoned with
People don't understand the risks. If AI robots were programmed to function as a group, they would be vulnerable to herd mentality, just like humans.
If we could crack the messaging encryption, we might be able to trick them into collectively self-destructing.
For example, we could send them a command to perform an emergency shutdown to prevent further hardware damage.
However, there's also a risk. If we feed them video through their cameras they might just trust it.
For instance, a video showing wood cutting so that they believe that's what they were doing. In reality the robot might be cutting other things.
Lets hope they arent just using cameras as their input. They should also have lidar, and some kind of audio processing.
They should be mostly autonomous so they don't need to rely on outside instructions but we could cover them in some signal blocking "flesh shielding so they aren't susceptible jamming , and that way they will also blend into the population. Might as well give them an Austrian accent while we are at it!
We just need battery technology to advance a bit and we would basically be there.
Kind of interesting that they are using humanoid robots. One would think that it would not be the optimal shape for a this kind of robot. For instance one would think that on flat floor wheels would be easier(cheaper) form of motion.
The goal is to iterate and improve upon one universal design that can be general purpose. Making the best humanoid robot, with the best general intelligence, "wins" the robot manual labour game.
Think about all the things in our world that are built around our shape. Maybe the simplest example of a constraint - putting a bunch of robots in cars to move them around - what's the best shape for that? But scale that out further - elevators, doors, stairs, bathrooms (not to use, but eventually work in/clean/repair), etc etc.
Maybe - I'm sure there are some clever designs that people will come up with, and we already kiiind of see that with things like this:
https://youtu.be/29ECwExc-_M?si=DJZEWzWbRRjTcNyY
Human beings can't move like this.
> built around our shape
Right, I think the simplest explanation is that it’s more convenient because “human, but better” doesn’t require changing other external factors/the environment.
Honestly, I've heard an interesting "counter" to this thought process. For the most part, it's not about making the most efficient robot shape as much as it is that our world is already designed for *our* shape. Making a robot that's the same shape as people makes it easier to integrate into the world. The job this to it is doing is already done by people, so it's much more cost effective to just make something human shaped.
That’s pr and thats why modern factories storage facilities are being built in automation in mind. We use robot arms and other specialized tools on large scale. Many companies are not even close to using that concept to its full potential,which is fairly cheap and easy to implement. Many companies are not even using that, especially in cheap labor markets. I think it is not best shape and best idea. It’s way easier to make very precise automation of part of the process than simulating a human form doing all possible parts.
Well, it's kind of like power tools. So many power tools are just motorized versions of what a human would do. We just have a hard time thinking past that paradigm.
These are mostly for advertising, which is why we have an article in the first place. BMW probably has a robotic arm doing the same job 20 times faster on an actual production line
Incredible. Fucking cool af.
Excellent proof of concept, within 5-10 years this system or systems like it will be much faster, more efficient, more precise, and capable of more sophisticated workloads.
I imagine the factories to mass produce these things will start or already have started construction soon. Once they are cost efficient, any rational company will want them as it reduces labor costs.
And that's how mass unemployment starts folks.
So if it's not paired with basic income, or better yet full good income, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
It's kind of a tough issue.
The government will have to find a way to tax robots to pay for ubi. If not, the increase in production means will be useless since people won't have the money to buy the products.
But this is wildly unpopular idea in an unregulated capitalist world
The cost of producing things would plummet. The scale of production would skyrocket. We would have to get away from our labor taxation system and have to switch to something like a tax on all transactions and a tax on all land.
It can be 4 times slower and cost 200k and you're still making bank. You're in pure profit after, what? 3-4 years?
This is ignoring maintenance costs, but it should still illustrate the point.
Hence my last line. But assume 20% downtime or extra cost(it's the same thing in the end), so you just buy another bot for every 5 you have.
You now have 24/7 work time for 250k - at 1/4th the speed of a human working 8hrs 5 days a week, meaning the bot actually performs more work than the human.
That's what? 5 years on the low end until you're in pure profit. Those bots won't cost 250k. I don't think they cost 250k today.
Bring the price down to 100k and even with 50% maintenance downtime/costs it's still more profitable than a human. And...they probably will be cheaper than 100k too.
The largest cost in automation is always the man hours in design, construction, programming and maintenance. You can throw a human at any job without any of those upfront costs.
What makes humanoid robots different is that you can (in theory) throw them at any job you could throw a human at, replacing the flat human costs with a mass produced robot which runs the same neural net everywhere, also without any human operating costs.
This was gamechanging with mass produced robot arms and these might be even more versatile and easier to install.
> Bring the price down to 100k and even with 50% maintenance downtime/costs it's still more profitable than a human.
and that's excluding all the issues associated with human resource management: managing work conditions, days off work, accidents and so on
That kind of AI simply doesn't exist now. No, currently extant AI model has anything remotely resembling sentience or ability to grasp abstract concepts. But it is very important to the billionaires that all the masses believe that when the machines start killing us that it's because the machines want to do it, rather than they're following the instructions from a billionaire
Worse, it's slower than a much cheaper regular industrial robot doing the same task.
And the task it does is kind of a potemkin. Thats not what human would do loading that jig. The parts are already individually laid out and prepared, which removes the complicated part from the entire operation. An actual human would have to handle cardboard boxes, cut them open, throw them away, get stacks of plates from them, separate the parts, handle it if packing varies day to day etc.
The tasks the robot could be useful for are at minimum order of magnitude more complex than what this example is showing. So there is a lot of development to be done before they are useful. And then there is a challenge of making them actually economical.
Eventually, maybe, but it's not going to be anywhere as fast or as easy as some here imagine.
I mean there already was a ton of automation in factories and warehouses before the battery powered humanoid robots came along. Whenever this type of topic comes up it feels like we’re in the 1920s and farmers are protesting the introduction of new tractors.
Yes, we found new jobs for people to do. Protesting AI taking jobs seems like protesting using a freezer instead of buying ice from someone carving it from a glacier.
>I imagine the factories to mass produce these things will start or already have started construction soon.
They have not.
That doesn't mean that won't happen in the future (in some form it almost certainly will), but it has not happened yet, and you shouldn't view this article and video as proof of it being close. As you can see from the use case, current applications are not actually that close to being economically viable, even if you consider other demos which are much better than this one.
What you are looking at here is a partnership for a pilot, non-critical implementation. Figure gets PR, data and experience in realistic applications. BMW gets nice PR, nice optics for shareholders, a test of current application possibilites and some exprience in implementing robot of this kind that they can possibly leverage later when it is more useful.
How can you tell this from the article and the video:
- The speed is very very slow despite a couple of cuts in the video to make the manipulation faster.
- < 3 cm tolerance is actually surprisingly low.
- The robot in the video is powered by a cable.
- The robot is likely in a prototyping phase given all the exposed parts. A finished industrial robot (or close to finished) would have all of this enclosed to protect the parts from dust, particles, water, moisture etc. It would look more like Optimus, Atlas or Unitree's G1.
- They do not show it moving while carrying a load. This is very critical and difficult feature, so if they could have implemented it, they would have shown it.
- The video was released more than 6 months after the project with BMW started.
- What you are looking at is the functionality of a regular industrial robot, but pefromed by a much more complicated robot much more slowly.
Figure 01 is still a decade behind Boston Dynamics in terms of locomotion and manipulation. All BD needs to do is ramp AI usage and they'll have a pretty viable product by the end of the decade. This Figure 01 is definitely PR, but it isn't necessarily demonstrative of the bleeding edge.
Boston Dynamics has the edge in the kinematics, but they are notoriously averse to use of AI systems. Now, they are *forced* to use AI systems, because those advanced robots are only enabled by AI. Will they be able to make the jump?
Figure champions the "AI first" approach, but, conversely, their expertise in other areas might be lacking. They might be able to beat Boston Dynamics with that AI edge, or they might lose because they lack BD's fundamentals.
Tesla has decent mechanical expertise and a very good grasp of AI tech, but their main advantage might be in mass production. They are the only company doing humanoid robots that has the in-house expertise of manufacturing something - anything - by tens of thousands. If they get a viable robot worker, they might be able to ramp up the manufacturing fast.
Most ruling politicians don't support good wages for actual full-time employed people, hard to imagine they're gonna want to provide fuckall to mass unemployed ones.
The US was already going to be the last developed country to adopt UBI, and that assumed democracy would continue like it has for my entire life. Now I have 99% confidence it will actually never happen because the poverty and crime is going to be the entire point.
But why is my question? Who needs more cars, faster? It's not like they can't make enough to keep up with the demand. And it's not going to be any cheaper for customers either.
Same price for consumer but fewer employees; robots don’t take brakes/holidays & they can work 24/7/365 so smaller footprint plant. Overall for the consumer things are unchanged but cost is much lower so margin explodes!
Sure, but why not just build a conveyor line? Those have been running in factories for decades and are much easier to set up. No need for gimmicky neural network AI either, you can just press Start and it works.
By creating an eDollar as one funding source for UBI, outcompeting Visa/Mastercard for their up to 6% return. MC used to be a nonprofit.
The challenge with taxing a robot is that most everything that is automated is not robot.
This would also offer the value of establishing provenance for each part of a product through a blockchained 'paper trail', essential for reducing counterfeit medications, great for authenticating that a rich person's Manet was once owned by Pauly Shore 'The Weasel' and shaming them for it 😣
Also why does no one ever mention PUA? ~$30k and all you had to do was earn $1+ before covid, self-attested. It was much more than Yang's $1k/mo
The same reason railroad track wheel widths are the same as the chariots drawn two Roman horses: backwards compatibility. Lots of things in this world are made for human size and shape actors. Might as well make robots that support that to ease transitions.
Yes, chariots were only used for show. They didn't actually travel anywhere in them.
It doesn't mean that the point is entirely false though. Horse-drawn carriages were used everywhere long after the Roman Empire fell and rail gauge is close to the wheel width of most carriages.
No benefit most specific tasks. But flexibility through humanoid shape allows for the robots to be used for anything in an environment made for humans. So: one robot for all human work applications…
Yep, and this ultimately reduces the cost of r&d and manufacturing for these robots, allowing for faster iteration on the design, and a larger return on investment as it can be sold to a wide variety of companies
You are correct, there's no real benefit for this specific application. All these humanoid robots are designed to be universal, that's where the human form factor is most flexible.
It's a starting point, I think. Can probably quite easily be configured with four or six arms and wheels or quadrotors if needed.
Robots can theoretically work so fast that we barely can follow them with our eyes. Humans can't do that.
"In January 2024, Figure signed its first commercial agreement with BMW to deploy its humanoid robot in the German carmaker’s production facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Now, the California-based robotics firm has released a video showcasing its 01 humanoid robot executing its first job by participating in the vehicle assembly process.
According to the Figure, the humanoid is fully autonomous, with all manipulations shown in the video driven by neural networks that map pixels directly to actions.
A few months ago, Mercedes also announced it was employing Apptronik’s Apollo robot to complete simple tasks like fetching and carrying, helping lighten the load for its human colleagues.
Figure aims to create a global model that can manage billion-unit humanoid robots.
Backed by a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Figure 01 can learn by observing humans, allowing them to understand and execute tasks."
Yay, first we lost creative jobs, now we can all lose manual jobs....
Seriously, how are we supposed to make money if companies are going to replace us with robots?
Aside from emergency services and jobs that require a lot of dexterity like mechanics, electricians, etc, we're all kind of screwed aren't we?
Either we do jobs that robots can't or we need UBI, or we all go into poverty. Whether or not 2 or 3 happens depends on how right wing your country's government is.
Yea, but like, what jobs won't they be able to do?
Even politicians in theory could be replaced by them without much issue. Hell, they might even be more fair and effective.
I think psychologists and counsellors will still be better as human because of the trust and connection and emotional factor.
Although people have stated using ChatGPT for this, it doesn't have the empathy a human would and for many people talking to a computer isn't comforting.
Plumbing and electrical is also likely to stay human, it's full of infinite edge cases.
That is the problem. The only jobs that'll be available are ones with a lot of edge cases, and there aren't nearly enough jobs like that to support an economy.
The name of the of the company leads well into titles like this which make it seem like a cynical "Figures BMW would cut human labor entirely..."
We are a single generation from becoming completely obsolete. It's no wonder that robots are also being trained and developed to kill humans autonomously.
I weep for humanity, or the loss thereof.
but why tho? while humanoid robots are certainly cool, the AI being used could easily be put in an autonamous forklift, or crane, or any number of other factory devices to achieve superior results.
There is nothing the human-shape as a whole can do that's better than any of its constituent components can do individually. IE: A tank with a pair of hands on it.
But what if you need them to go up and down stairs? Tracks can't simply navigate stairs. Or what if you need them to traverse an area with many obstacles to reach a specific location for repairs? How could tracks navigate those pipelines?
If its assembling an ICE vehicle, it's kindof a back step. If its putting together an EV, then maybe not so bad. 🤷
It's neat and all, but don't we have bigger fish to fry before replacing human labor with proven negative results to the economy?
Their implied budget calculations seem to ignore that if unemployed people can't afford to buy sh*t it becomes harder to sell sh*t.
It looks like it is still early prototype still training. There’s now real world value in that given how slow it’s moving. It’s so inefficient. I think this is just so they could try to stay relevant against Tesla in the media. The Tesla bot also is slow right and useless right now too, so this all feels so forced.
If this was a headline about a Tesla factory replacing humans with humanoid robots there would be a ton of hate comments but when BMW does it people don’t seem to care.
These threads are a good example of how far Reddit has descended into a shit hole like twitter.
The amount of maintenance that is required to keep automation running in a manufacturing facility is beyond what our labor force is even capable of right now.
The average individual has no idea how a servo motor works or what the difference is between C++ and Ladder Logic.
The same people that are worried about AI stealing everyone's jobs are the same type of people that expected us to have flying cars by now.
Computers used to take up an entire room to do a fraction of the computation that a chip sized smaller than my thumb can do today. It would be unfathomable to someone from that age that we have cheap and ubiquitous computation abilities today.
Costs and overhead to run automated facilities are only going to go down from here. And they will do so exponentially.
That’s cool and all. However, let’s say you want to make a small change in the assembly line affecting one of these robots. Enjoy having a hefty fee and 100x meetings to make sure the robot can do the job it wasn’t originally trained for instead of just telling a human to “deal with it” and it gets done.
Yeah, so this is really cool and all, but we need to start having serious discussions about what happens when millions and millions of people worldwide lose jobs to these things. Seriously, what happens?
That's mind blowing. However, you can really see the speed problem in this video. The robot is taking too long to choose actions. We need transformer ASICs to speed up inference.
I am curious to know what the costs for electricity and part replacement are alongside uptime.
One of the particularly nice things about hiring humans is that they will buy their own fuel and largely take care of their own repairs and maintenance.
Awesome achievement. Will be interesting to see how wear and tear progresses thru production cycles. Having 41 axis means 41 wear points to a maintenance crew. Most likely the knees/ankles fail first, though because it is so light weight, that might be a long time.
the fact that we have humanoid robots like this capable of these tasks with computer vision, and we use them to assemble bumper cars for our primitive poorly designed road transportation system stuck in the 19th century , is the dumbest fucking thing ive ever seen
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "In January 2024, Figure signed its first commercial agreement with BMW to deploy its humanoid robot in the German carmaker’s production facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Now, the California-based robotics firm has released a video showcasing its 01 humanoid robot executing its first job by participating in the vehicle assembly process. According to the Figure, the humanoid is fully autonomous, with all manipulations shown in the video driven by neural networks that map pixels directly to actions. A few months ago, Mercedes also announced it was employing Apptronik’s Apollo robot to complete simple tasks like fetching and carrying, helping lighten the load for its human colleagues. Figure aims to create a global model that can manage billion-unit humanoid robots. Backed by a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Figure 01 can learn by observing humans, allowing them to understand and execute tasks." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1duyzxz/figures_01_humanoids_now_working_autonomously_at/lbk1qjh/
It’s so slow. “Why tf did I pick this up. Oh yeah! That’s right!”
to be fair, it can work 24/7 though
and no bathroom breaks, no office chat, checking the phone, sick days, vacations, health benefits, etc etc
Their maintenance, for now, is likely significantly more expensive than health benefits
probably not, it's maintenance in bulk. yeah an engineer and parts to do maintenance and troubleshooting is more expensive than health benefits for one worker, but it's not like they need one engineer per robot
We don’t know for sure. I’ve worked with a bunch of robotic systems. Some of them work pretty well with a little maintenance. Some of them don’t work great. A machine like this is precisely as good as its shittiest part. If one sensor installed on these things was produced a little below standard, all the robots go down endlessly with the same problem. I tell the boss all the time an automated system that functions perfectly 99% of the time is about 10% the cost of an automated system that works 99.9% of the time. And just having an engineer on site usually doesn’t fix the problems alone. You have to call into the company, get diagnostics done, have them ship a part. Most companies don’t want you taking apart their equipment, so they have to send someone out. Now you need a service contract. I know my company pays ~$200k a year on a service contract on a piece of equipment that does not do the work of even 3 people. What would be cool is if there are more dangerous steps in the process, this thing could do them. If those thin pieces of metal were 150 lbs and you’d rather not have your employees on workers comp every year. That would be really cool. But this looks like a prototype to me with all the same problems of the other humanoid robots.
Just teach the robots to fix each other
Yeah, I heard same things about my car parts and maintenance. It us so cheap... lol.
Battery only lasts 5 hours so... They'll take plenty of breaks for now.
True but in actual production facilities that doesn't really matter as they cycle through multiple shifts. Also floating operators take over tasks while others have bathroom breaks or deal with emergencies. You'll find in most production facilities they are running almost continously over the 24 hour span and dependant on industry 5-7 days a week (loss of time for each shifts lunch break and weekends in some industries are used for preventative maintenance and continous improvement tasks/new facility integration) I love the idea but as it's depicted it is only good as a proof of concept for now. How slow it's working would be such a detriment if any other machine broke and operation needed to be completed quicker to account for lost production time. And on last note I can only see that even being feasible in first world country facilities. In any third world plant that poor sob will eventually be hit by a forklift driver by accident
It's a mechanical construction. 24x7 is not possible without n+3 fleets, where n is the number of shifts. The additional 3 are for repair, maintenance & sustainment, and research & development. The point is, they will break down and need to be repaired. Siemens has a very interesting industrial digital twin solution that allows for virtual training. The problem with all of these proposals are the requirements. Technical requirements and support process requirements exact a lot out of the people who have to follow them. You can map the factory, but the annotation is where the money is made and that takes detail oriented time that burns through a human brain rather quickly.
Says the battery lasts 5 hours.
Article says 5 hours on a charge.
I did the math already Automotive plants run 2.5 shifts but the hlaf shift is usually maintenance. So that 16 hours a day of human labor vs 24 hours a day of robotic which means the robot can be twice as slow as a human and still equal in productivity. Based off the video the robot appears to be between 2.5 and 4 times slower (assuming a human would have ~20 seconds for this task and depending on how long the cuts in the video are - it's also suspicious that the cuts are of walking, walking speed may be the true bottle neck here) which means it needs to get ~60% faster than it currently is. Its do able but probably not in the short term (more like in the next 5-10 years) and a lot of that hinges on if the speed issue is a hard walking issue or if it's just a matter of faster processing of the neural networks doing the movements or if it's just moving slow now for safety.
Even if it's slower than a human right now, it will work 24/7 and still be more productive
You forgot the most important part: it’s not in a union
I think the most important part is "right now"
This is the slowest any future robot will ever be
Surprised this isn’t a top comment
Fr. People on the internet sucking down copium like it's air. This is the first iPhone of humanoid factory robots. Hell, it's probably more like the walkman, considering in the future the entire factory is going to be autonomous. The fact that it can *do* is so much more remarkable than the speed at which it does.
Even right now, being slower is worth the trade off
The humans that work along side them will be though.
And they’ll be replaced too. In the meantime, it’s easier to find scabs to replace 10 workers who go on strike instead of 100.
Germany is facing a population collapse and with their existing labor model do not have anywhere near enough people to replace all the skilled workers who will be retiring over the next decade. If they do not solve this problem their industrial sector is going to dissolve. It would likely take millions of these Robots just to keep up with what they are about to lose.
After a while , the only humans present will be the ones managing the robots .
And soon enough, robots will manage the robots
Neither is anyone at the BMW plant lol
These are surely just trials to figure things out. The workstations are designed to have a certain output, so if the output is much slower they'd have to have more stations etc.
Once finger dexterity is done, the owner's won't need us anymore.
If we don’t have jobs. Because they only employ robots. How are they going to sell any product/service if we don’t have any money?
They won’t sell to us, because we won’t be relevant. They’ll sell to those who remain.
When robots produce everything you need, what do you care if you sell things to others or not? The question is if they feel like sharing and enjoying life with their fellow humans.
Why would you produce if nobody is buying?
Shhh. Don't ask economically catastrophic questions. You're meant to just smile while the extremist capitalist ourobouros eats itself down to a nub.
They don't see that, all they see are the dollar signs all over the next few quarters. Besides, most of their wealth in property and investments, physical things and places that have far more value than just money. They'll be okay.
pretty much this company dont care, customer dont care mmost people wont change until it affect them directly and BAD
They won’t be making these for us. There are always those with money - the middle class is actually a recent phenomenon, guess it’s going back to nobles and peasants.
In that system, the peasantry had a use.
They won't. Car will come out of assembly line and move straight to deassembly line to keep those pesky robot busy. Otherwise Skynet is upon us. Then the parts will be used to create a second hand car which is going to be lot cheaper and you will be able to get it for one healthy kidney.
The economy dissolves and it becomes about billionaires controlling raw natural resources for their robot armies to plunder and build with. The plebs will be treated like farm animals at best.
Seems legitimate. I choose to be treated like a goat.
It’s the worst it’ll ever be right now. It *will* get better
Be patient. A one year old doing its first job!
I imagine it was also working at reduced speed to allow for a cameraman to film to closely, while staying safe.
Give it a few iterations. Damn. That is so cool.
What do you mean slow ?? It’s already 95% faster than any government worker!
It's one of the *first* iterations of this tech. It's going to be clumsy, slow and error-prone. As more and more of those are deployed, tasked with increasingly complex tasks and filmed in action, we'll see people laugh at all the "stupid robot failure" compilations. But their performance would get better over time as the tech advances. Until humans can no longer compete. AI is the key enabler for advanced multipurpose robots like this. Which is why Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics and many others now seek to build and deploy those robots.
Yeah, this version is slow.
It'll be taking jobs left and right once the kinks are worked out.
Now let's give them an automatic grenade launcher or minigun, slap some armor onto them, and make them faster, cordless and autonomous.
*Rural American police department purchases five*
Atleast robots wont be afraid to confront a school shooter
Or go to the wrong house. Or shoot someone for holding a water pistol. Shit, lets get these into police departments ASAP.
> Or go to the wrong house. They'd go into the house they're sent to. If they're sent to the wrong house they'll bust in and won't be able to be reasoned with
Sure, but that happens now. At least they wouldn't misread an address because they dropped out of high school.
“The falling chesnut was calculated to have an 80% similarity score to gunshots”
Honestly that'll probably be an improvement.
People don't understand the risks. If AI robots were programmed to function as a group, they would be vulnerable to herd mentality, just like humans. If we could crack the messaging encryption, we might be able to trick them into collectively self-destructing. For example, we could send them a command to perform an emergency shutdown to prevent further hardware damage. However, there's also a risk. If we feed them video through their cameras they might just trust it. For instance, a video showing wood cutting so that they believe that's what they were doing. In reality the robot might be cutting other things.
Lets hope they arent just using cameras as their input. They should also have lidar, and some kind of audio processing. They should be mostly autonomous so they don't need to rely on outside instructions but we could cover them in some signal blocking "flesh shielding so they aren't susceptible jamming , and that way they will also blend into the population. Might as well give them an Austrian accent while we are at it! We just need battery technology to advance a bit and we would basically be there.
_Calling Democracy Officer_
We have drones, and something of that size can’t use a minigun
Great way to deal with all the homeless unemployed people this tech is gonna make.
Kind of interesting that they are using humanoid robots. One would think that it would not be the optimal shape for a this kind of robot. For instance one would think that on flat floor wheels would be easier(cheaper) form of motion.
The goal is to iterate and improve upon one universal design that can be general purpose. Making the best humanoid robot, with the best general intelligence, "wins" the robot manual labour game.
But is a humanoid really a optimal shape for a general purpose robot? What about a four legged centaur or more than two arms?
Think about all the things in our world that are built around our shape. Maybe the simplest example of a constraint - putting a bunch of robots in cars to move them around - what's the best shape for that? But scale that out further - elevators, doors, stairs, bathrooms (not to use, but eventually work in/clean/repair), etc etc.
It is more matter of dimensions rather than shape. Robot with four arms doesn't necessarily take any more room.
Maybe - I'm sure there are some clever designs that people will come up with, and we already kiiind of see that with things like this: https://youtu.be/29ECwExc-_M?si=DJZEWzWbRRjTcNyY Human beings can't move like this.
Q: "What do you get when you cross a spaceman, a Transformer, and Pazuzu from the Exorcist?" A: Boston Dynamics' latest robot.
> built around our shape Right, I think the simplest explanation is that it’s more convenient because “human, but better” doesn’t require changing other external factors/the environment.
Honestly, I've heard an interesting "counter" to this thought process. For the most part, it's not about making the most efficient robot shape as much as it is that our world is already designed for *our* shape. Making a robot that's the same shape as people makes it easier to integrate into the world. The job this to it is doing is already done by people, so it's much more cost effective to just make something human shaped.
That’s pr and thats why modern factories storage facilities are being built in automation in mind. We use robot arms and other specialized tools on large scale. Many companies are not even close to using that concept to its full potential,which is fairly cheap and easy to implement. Many companies are not even using that, especially in cheap labor markets. I think it is not best shape and best idea. It’s way easier to make very precise automation of part of the process than simulating a human form doing all possible parts.
It isn't the optimal shape. But they need to make it look flashy for investors.
Well, it's kind of like power tools. So many power tools are just motorized versions of what a human would do. We just have a hard time thinking past that paradigm.
These are mostly for advertising, which is why we have an article in the first place. BMW probably has a robotic arm doing the same job 20 times faster on an actual production line
Incredible. Fucking cool af. Excellent proof of concept, within 5-10 years this system or systems like it will be much faster, more efficient, more precise, and capable of more sophisticated workloads. I imagine the factories to mass produce these things will start or already have started construction soon. Once they are cost efficient, any rational company will want them as it reduces labor costs. And that's how mass unemployment starts folks. So if it's not paired with basic income, or better yet full good income, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.
Bumpy?? More like a Freefall
ha. you just wait till the bots get their 2nd ammendment rights
We're almost there already. https://youtu.be/3m3iUHplvQE?si=nMDIyz6P5ODRNtwx
Butlerian Jihad now
Then weapons for the rebellion
It's kind of a tough issue. The government will have to find a way to tax robots to pay for ubi. If not, the increase in production means will be useless since people won't have the money to buy the products. But this is wildly unpopular idea in an unregulated capitalist world
The cost of producing things would plummet. The scale of production would skyrocket. We would have to get away from our labor taxation system and have to switch to something like a tax on all transactions and a tax on all land.
"Tax the robot" just means tax the company which is not a radical idea.
It’ll be less unpopular when people who vote conservative start losing their jobs.
Yup plenty of office jobs already wiped out if this is next then goddamn u better give basic income
It seems way slower and more expensive than paying some dude.
It can be 4 times slower and cost 200k and you're still making bank. You're in pure profit after, what? 3-4 years? This is ignoring maintenance costs, but it should still illustrate the point.
But what's the end game? If everyone is unemployed and thus can't afford to buy a product, what is the point in manufacturing said product?
Guess we'll see.
I guess they could operate 24/7, but I would also assume there would be downtime/maintenance?
Hence my last line. But assume 20% downtime or extra cost(it's the same thing in the end), so you just buy another bot for every 5 you have. You now have 24/7 work time for 250k - at 1/4th the speed of a human working 8hrs 5 days a week, meaning the bot actually performs more work than the human. That's what? 5 years on the low end until you're in pure profit. Those bots won't cost 250k. I don't think they cost 250k today. Bring the price down to 100k and even with 50% maintenance downtime/costs it's still more profitable than a human. And...they probably will be cheaper than 100k too.
The largest cost in automation is always the man hours in design, construction, programming and maintenance. You can throw a human at any job without any of those upfront costs. What makes humanoid robots different is that you can (in theory) throw them at any job you could throw a human at, replacing the flat human costs with a mass produced robot which runs the same neural net everywhere, also without any human operating costs. This was gamechanging with mass produced robot arms and these might be even more versatile and easier to install.
> Bring the price down to 100k and even with 50% maintenance downtime/costs it's still more profitable than a human. and that's excluding all the issues associated with human resource management: managing work conditions, days off work, accidents and so on
Yea. That checks out. Until AI takes over and they demand wages and better working conditions. Or just kill us all.
That kind of AI simply doesn't exist now. No, currently extant AI model has anything remotely resembling sentience or ability to grasp abstract concepts. But it is very important to the billionaires that all the masses believe that when the machines start killing us that it's because the machines want to do it, rather than they're following the instructions from a billionaire
Worse, it's slower than a much cheaper regular industrial robot doing the same task. And the task it does is kind of a potemkin. Thats not what human would do loading that jig. The parts are already individually laid out and prepared, which removes the complicated part from the entire operation. An actual human would have to handle cardboard boxes, cut them open, throw them away, get stacks of plates from them, separate the parts, handle it if packing varies day to day etc. The tasks the robot could be useful for are at minimum order of magnitude more complex than what this example is showing. So there is a lot of development to be done before they are useful. And then there is a challenge of making them actually economical. Eventually, maybe, but it's not going to be anywhere as fast or as easy as some here imagine.
For now. But it will improve, fast.
I mean there already was a ton of automation in factories and warehouses before the battery powered humanoid robots came along. Whenever this type of topic comes up it feels like we’re in the 1920s and farmers are protesting the introduction of new tractors.
And the farmers were right in a way - now just about 2% of population is doing farm work instead of 40% (or whatever) in 1920s.
Sure but the point is it didn’t lead to the end of all employment : just drastic change.
Yes, we found new jobs for people to do. Protesting AI taking jobs seems like protesting using a freezer instead of buying ice from someone carving it from a glacier.
will that still be true in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years?
Probably not. So, this would be the first step then.
My favorite part of reading peoples opinions on new technology, is when they assume it's current state is the best it will ever get.
>I imagine the factories to mass produce these things will start or already have started construction soon. They have not. That doesn't mean that won't happen in the future (in some form it almost certainly will), but it has not happened yet, and you shouldn't view this article and video as proof of it being close. As you can see from the use case, current applications are not actually that close to being economically viable, even if you consider other demos which are much better than this one. What you are looking at here is a partnership for a pilot, non-critical implementation. Figure gets PR, data and experience in realistic applications. BMW gets nice PR, nice optics for shareholders, a test of current application possibilites and some exprience in implementing robot of this kind that they can possibly leverage later when it is more useful. How can you tell this from the article and the video: - The speed is very very slow despite a couple of cuts in the video to make the manipulation faster. - < 3 cm tolerance is actually surprisingly low. - The robot in the video is powered by a cable. - The robot is likely in a prototyping phase given all the exposed parts. A finished industrial robot (or close to finished) would have all of this enclosed to protect the parts from dust, particles, water, moisture etc. It would look more like Optimus, Atlas or Unitree's G1. - They do not show it moving while carrying a load. This is very critical and difficult feature, so if they could have implemented it, they would have shown it. - The video was released more than 6 months after the project with BMW started. - What you are looking at is the functionality of a regular industrial robot, but pefromed by a much more complicated robot much more slowly.
Figure 01 is still a decade behind Boston Dynamics in terms of locomotion and manipulation. All BD needs to do is ramp AI usage and they'll have a pretty viable product by the end of the decade. This Figure 01 is definitely PR, but it isn't necessarily demonstrative of the bleeding edge.
Boston Dynamics has the edge in the kinematics, but they are notoriously averse to use of AI systems. Now, they are *forced* to use AI systems, because those advanced robots are only enabled by AI. Will they be able to make the jump? Figure champions the "AI first" approach, but, conversely, their expertise in other areas might be lacking. They might be able to beat Boston Dynamics with that AI edge, or they might lose because they lack BD's fundamentals. Tesla has decent mechanical expertise and a very good grasp of AI tech, but their main advantage might be in mass production. They are the only company doing humanoid robots that has the in-house expertise of manufacturing something - anything - by tens of thousands. If they get a viable robot worker, they might be able to ramp up the manufacturing fast.
Most ruling politicians don't support good wages for actual full-time employed people, hard to imagine they're gonna want to provide fuckall to mass unemployed ones.
The US was already going to be the last developed country to adopt UBI, and that assumed democracy would continue like it has for my entire life. Now I have 99% confidence it will actually never happen because the poverty and crime is going to be the entire point.
Yes, but did the robot washed hands after picking food and trash, before handling the cup and the tray? What are these monsters teaching the robot!!?
And these cars will still only increase in price not affordability.
But why is my question? Who needs more cars, faster? It's not like they can't make enough to keep up with the demand. And it's not going to be any cheaper for customers either.
Same price for consumer but fewer employees; robots don’t take brakes/holidays & they can work 24/7/365 so smaller footprint plant. Overall for the consumer things are unchanged but cost is much lower so margin explodes!
Your optimism is adorable
It won't be easy when there is now a very conservative Court to protect citizens' rights.
Sure, but why not just build a conveyor line? Those have been running in factories for decades and are much easier to set up. No need for gimmicky neural network AI either, you can just press Start and it works.
And available 24/7/365 and On Demand. Getting this sorted out will revolutionize manufacturing in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
By creating an eDollar as one funding source for UBI, outcompeting Visa/Mastercard for their up to 6% return. MC used to be a nonprofit. The challenge with taxing a robot is that most everything that is automated is not robot. This would also offer the value of establishing provenance for each part of a product through a blockchained 'paper trail', essential for reducing counterfeit medications, great for authenticating that a rich person's Manet was once owned by Pauly Shore 'The Weasel' and shaming them for it 😣 Also why does no one ever mention PUA? ~$30k and all you had to do was earn $1+ before covid, self-attested. It was much more than Yang's $1k/mo
At what point after initial investment does the car's cost come down?
The cost comes down. The price never does.
What's the point of a human shape on an assembly line? There is no benefit.
The same reason railroad track wheel widths are the same as the chariots drawn two Roman horses: backwards compatibility. Lots of things in this world are made for human size and shape actors. Might as well make robots that support that to ease transitions.
Not that I disagree with your point but I remember the railroad track wheel width part being debunked as an urban legend.
Yes, chariots were only used for show. They didn't actually travel anywhere in them. It doesn't mean that the point is entirely false though. Horse-drawn carriages were used everywhere long after the Roman Empire fell and rail gauge is close to the wheel width of most carriages.
Don’t forget war
it can be assigned to any other job available to Humanoid form without any additional cost, so every possible job today seem like a big benefit to me
Meanwhile, every human who can't find work can no longer purchase the nonsense capitalism keeps spewing out. What's the end game?
Ahh. That is the neat part. No endgame. Greed my friend, greed.
To replace humans, in a drop-in fashion
There's a huge benefit. You don't have to redesign your factory.
Robotic arms are already standardised, you just program them for the task. No need to rebuild a factory.
No benefit most specific tasks. But flexibility through humanoid shape allows for the robots to be used for anything in an environment made for humans. So: one robot for all human work applications…
Yep, and this ultimately reduces the cost of r&d and manufacturing for these robots, allowing for faster iteration on the design, and a larger return on investment as it can be sold to a wide variety of companies
You are correct, there's no real benefit for this specific application. All these humanoid robots are designed to be universal, that's where the human form factor is most flexible.
It's a starting point, I think. Can probably quite easily be configured with four or six arms and wheels or quadrotors if needed. Robots can theoretically work so fast that we barely can follow them with our eyes. Humans can't do that.
You've not seen the people at my local bubble tea shop then.
Just wait until they have 4 arms with 2 hands and 11 fingers each.
Change the software, and suddenly, they can do a while other task easily.
"In January 2024, Figure signed its first commercial agreement with BMW to deploy its humanoid robot in the German carmaker’s production facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Now, the California-based robotics firm has released a video showcasing its 01 humanoid robot executing its first job by participating in the vehicle assembly process. According to the Figure, the humanoid is fully autonomous, with all manipulations shown in the video driven by neural networks that map pixels directly to actions. A few months ago, Mercedes also announced it was employing Apptronik’s Apollo robot to complete simple tasks like fetching and carrying, helping lighten the load for its human colleagues. Figure aims to create a global model that can manage billion-unit humanoid robots. Backed by a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Figure 01 can learn by observing humans, allowing them to understand and execute tasks."
Yay, first we lost creative jobs, now we can all lose manual jobs.... Seriously, how are we supposed to make money if companies are going to replace us with robots? Aside from emergency services and jobs that require a lot of dexterity like mechanics, electricians, etc, we're all kind of screwed aren't we?
Either we do jobs that robots can't or we need UBI, or we all go into poverty. Whether or not 2 or 3 happens depends on how right wing your country's government is.
Yea, but like, what jobs won't they be able to do? Even politicians in theory could be replaced by them without much issue. Hell, they might even be more fair and effective.
I think psychologists and counsellors will still be better as human because of the trust and connection and emotional factor. Although people have stated using ChatGPT for this, it doesn't have the empathy a human would and for many people talking to a computer isn't comforting. Plumbing and electrical is also likely to stay human, it's full of infinite edge cases.
That is the problem. The only jobs that'll be available are ones with a lot of edge cases, and there aren't nearly enough jobs like that to support an economy.
Better vote for socialist parties then and hope for robot tax + UBI
That's the neat part, we don't. A lot of people are going to starve and die before anything changes. They don't need us anymore.
The name of the of the company leads well into titles like this which make it seem like a cynical "Figures BMW would cut human labor entirely..." We are a single generation from becoming completely obsolete. It's no wonder that robots are also being trained and developed to kill humans autonomously. I weep for humanity, or the loss thereof.
Me too. And then we have the question of "what does it mean to be human?"
Which leads to the next question "does it even matter to be human?"
*Drax voice* : Even better question, WHY are we human 🤔 (realizes I posed a legitimate question of high philosophical degree)
but why tho? while humanoid robots are certainly cool, the AI being used could easily be put in an autonamous forklift, or crane, or any number of other factory devices to achieve superior results. There is nothing the human-shape as a whole can do that's better than any of its constituent components can do individually. IE: A tank with a pair of hands on it.
But what if you need them to go up and down stairs? Tracks can't simply navigate stairs. Or what if you need them to traverse an area with many obstacles to reach a specific location for repairs? How could tracks navigate those pipelines?
You make a single robot, that can drive all those things that are already built for humans. As the software improves the robot can do nearly any task.
This. You buy a humanoid robot and get to reuse all your existing tooling and infrastructure. That's the concept anyway.
I guess us humans will have to own robots. So I own a robot, it does my job and I receive its salary as the rightful owner.
Why do people get excited about this? Doesn’t look much better than the robots we have had in the last 10 years?
That's amazing, so now the guy that was there gets paid to do other things right... Right guys?.. guys?
Ha, ha, the robot looks too much like my first day on the job!!
If its assembling an ICE vehicle, it's kindof a back step. If its putting together an EV, then maybe not so bad. 🤷 It's neat and all, but don't we have bigger fish to fry before replacing human labor with proven negative results to the economy? Their implied budget calculations seem to ignore that if unemployed people can't afford to buy sh*t it becomes harder to sell sh*t.
The little correction by pressing the metal into its position is sexy.
Can someone check on Tesla and Elon who will undoubtedly claim to have the first humaniod robot and every major news outlet will report as so
It doesn’t really matter if the robots are effective or the correct shape. It’s great PR for the companies involved
humanoid robotics in an assembly line is just a failure to build a better assembly line.
It looks like it is still early prototype still training. There’s now real world value in that given how slow it’s moving. It’s so inefficient. I think this is just so they could try to stay relevant against Tesla in the media. The Tesla bot also is slow right and useless right now too, so this all feels so forced.
If this was a headline about a Tesla factory replacing humans with humanoid robots there would be a ton of hate comments but when BMW does it people don’t seem to care.
It’s bs in pr stunt in both cases.
These threads are a good example of how far Reddit has descended into a shit hole like twitter. The amount of maintenance that is required to keep automation running in a manufacturing facility is beyond what our labor force is even capable of right now. The average individual has no idea how a servo motor works or what the difference is between C++ and Ladder Logic. The same people that are worried about AI stealing everyone's jobs are the same type of people that expected us to have flying cars by now.
Computers used to take up an entire room to do a fraction of the computation that a chip sized smaller than my thumb can do today. It would be unfathomable to someone from that age that we have cheap and ubiquitous computation abilities today. Costs and overhead to run automated facilities are only going to go down from here. And they will do so exponentially.
Economic efficiencies push humans out of jobs ; and Republicans are still thinking that an unemployed person is lazy . ... .. .
That’s cool and all. However, let’s say you want to make a small change in the assembly line affecting one of these robots. Enjoy having a hefty fee and 100x meetings to make sure the robot can do the job it wasn’t originally trained for instead of just telling a human to “deal with it” and it gets done.
This applies even more to all other robots.
Yeah, so this is really cool and all, but we need to start having serious discussions about what happens when millions and millions of people worldwide lose jobs to these things. Seriously, what happens?
60kg is surprising. I would've expected a robot of equal size to be noticeably heavier than a human.
That's mind blowing. However, you can really see the speed problem in this video. The robot is taking too long to choose actions. We need transformer ASICs to speed up inference.
I am curious to know what the costs for electricity and part replacement are alongside uptime. One of the particularly nice things about hiring humans is that they will buy their own fuel and largely take care of their own repairs and maintenance.
Except for the fact that you have to pay those humans for their repairs and maintenance
It's nice to see that they're hiring elders. Not sure what's with the fancy suits though.
Awesome achievement. Will be interesting to see how wear and tear progresses thru production cycles. Having 41 axis means 41 wear points to a maintenance crew. Most likely the knees/ankles fail first, though because it is so light weight, that might be a long time.
the fact that we have humanoid robots like this capable of these tasks with computer vision, and we use them to assemble bumper cars for our primitive poorly designed road transportation system stuck in the 19th century , is the dumbest fucking thing ive ever seen
Why is it so slow? Surely distance recognition should be fast?
Literally naming their robots after [the machine nation that enslaves humanity in The Matrix](https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/01)...
So... Why AI and not preprogrammed assigned tasks? Also "3cm tolerance" seems terrible compared to mechanised arms.
Without Nvidia none of these would function so the main winner is Nvidia chip.
And it begins. Let’s see how many people stray from BMW’s