Figure tests Helix 2.5 humanoid robot in real-world home environments

Figure, a California-based company, recently tested its Helix 2.5 humanoid robot in 30 different homes across the San Francisco Bay Area. The deployment aimed to test the robot's ability to perform complex, unmapped tasks such as making beds, folding towels, and tidying living rooms without prior training or specific environmental maps.

By utilizing a proprietary index dataset of human behavior, the company reported that the robot's zero-shot task success rate increased from 9% to 56%. Despite these technical advancements in embodied AI generalization, the deployment highlights significant privacy concerns regarding the potential for home robots to access intimate details of users' private lives.

In the broader robotics industry, experts suggest a shift in development philosophy is necessary for commercial viability. Rather than building advanced physical platforms first and searching for tasks, the industry may need to adopt a workflow-centric approach. This method involves identifying tasks with economic value first and then engineering the specific hardware, sensors, and form factors required to complete those tasks efficiently.