The American startup Figure AI has achieved a significant milestone in the history of humanoid robotics. With its new artificial intelligence model, Helix 02, the company has successfully integrated locomotion, manipulation, and balance within a single neural system, paving the way for robots capable of naturally navigating complex and changing environments. Previously, robots often had to switch between moving and manipulating tasks, resulting in jerky and unnatural movements. Helix 02 breaks away from this fragmented approach with a Vision-Language-Action architecture controlled by a single network, connecting all sensors – vision, touch, motion perception – directly to actuators, allowing the robot to act smoothly and without interruption between actions.
The system is built on three complementary levels. The top level handles language understanding and goals, while a second level translates perception into coordinated gestures. The innovation lies in a third level operating at a very high frequency, responsible for balance and stability, trained from thousands of hours of human motion data. The outcome is a more natural motor skills and real-time adaptation to physical constraints. To showcase its advancements, Figure AI demonstrated its robot independently performing a complex household task: emptying and filling a dishwasher in a kitchen. For several minutes, the machine executed dozens of actions seamlessly, manipulating fragile objects, moving precisely, and coordinating its two arms in a confined space, a feat rarely achieved by an autonomous humanoid robot thus far. Helix 02 also enables fine manipulations such as unscrewing a cap, extracting a pill, or sorting small metal components.
By combining close-up vision, tactile sensors, and overall body control, Figure AI establishes the groundwork for versatile autonomy, capable of adapting to unforeseen real-world situations. While this technology is currently limited to the laboratory, it also represents a significant turn in the quest for practical everyday humanoid robots. Helix 02 outlines a future where household assistance, logistics, and industries could rely on machines truly capable of interacting with their environment seamlessly and intelligently.
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