Figure’s Helix Robot Becomes First Humanoid to Fold Laundry Autonomously

Humanoid-robotics start-up Figure has unveiled a demonstration of Figure 02, which the company says is the first humanoid machine to fold laundry autonomously. The video released on 12 Aug. shows the bipedal robot grasping, folding and stacking towels without human assistance, a milestone long viewed as a benchmark for dexterous manipulation of soft, deformable objects. Figure 02 runs on the company’s Helix end-to-end neural-network architecture, the same model previously used for logistics tasks such as pallet moving. Engineers said no changes were made to the code, model weights or hyper-parameters; the system only required additional training data to learn the new chore. According to Figure, Helix was exposed to roughly 500 hours of recorded human task demonstrations. The company argues that the result illustrates the architecture’s ability to generalize rapidly to new environments, a prerequisite for broad-spectrum service robots that could one day handle a range of household or industrial duties.