Figure robot cleaned 30 homes it had never seen

The company Figure, which builds humanlike robots (humanoid robots, meaning robots shaped like humans with two arms and two legs), has shown a new version of its control system called Helix 2.5. The system is a kind of artificial brain that controls the robot's movements and decisions.

What's new is that the robots handled tasks in 30 different homes in the San Francisco area that they had never visited before, and without having been trained specifically in those particular homes. This is called zero-shot, meaning the robot solves a task the first time without prior practice in the specific situation.

The robots tidied living rooms by gathering 13 to 15 scattered toys into a basket, folded towels and put them in a basket, and made beds by straightening duvets and pillows. All three tasks were performed by the same foundation model, meaning one and the same system trained once, which could then adapt to different tasks and surroundings.

Massive training gives better results

According to Figure, the robot's success rate rose from 9 to 56 percent when the system was first trained on the company's large dataset called Index, compared to a robot trained from scratch without the prior training. Index collects data on human behavior, meaning recordings and information about how humans perform everyday chores, and according to Figure it grows by about 35 minutes of new material every second.

Figure calls the result the first proof that a robot can learn general physical intelligence from human experience and then transfer that knowledge to entirely new surroundings. The company also says it has set aside $3.5 billion in computing power to train the Helix system further, and that it is hiring more staff for the work.

No date for consumers yet

There is no information about price or when ordinary consumers or companies can buy or rent the robots. The tests have so far been carried out in the US, and nothing suggests the technology is available in Denmark or Europe yet. So it is still a research result and a technical milestone rather than a product you can order.

For Danish readers, the news is most interesting as a sign of how quickly robots with artificial intelligence are developing the ability to handle ordinary household tasks without special training in each individual home. Whether and when it becomes relevant to Danish consumers depends on whether Figure or competitors later launch the robots commercially outside the US.