AI-Powered Robots Advance in General Tasks in a Crowded Market | PYMNTS.com

The dream of having robots do household chores inched a little closer to reality last week.

Figure, an OpenAI-backed robotics artificial intelligence (AI) startup, showed off humanoid robots that can understand voice commands and can grab objects they had never seen before.

In a Figure video, a guy holding a bag of groceries starts unloading eggs, apple, ketchup, cheese, cookies and other items on a counter.

“Hey Figures, can you come here?” the person said to the robots. “Even though this is the very first time that you’ve ever seen these items, I’d like you to use your new Helix AI and try to reason through where you think they belong … and work together to put them away. Does that sound good?”

The robots started putting the fresh items — eggs, ketchup and cheese — in the fridge. Cookies in a drawer and the apple in a container on the counter. They worked together, even handing some items to each other.

Figure claims it is the first to enable two robots to collaborate on a task and that the bots can pick up “virtually any small household object” even if they’ve never seen it before.

The robots are powered by Helix, a generalist AI model that combines vision, language understanding, and movement control to make robots smarter and more adaptable. It solves major challenges in robotics, especially in home environments, where objects are unpredictable and varied.

Figure said it developed Helix in-house. Previously, it was using OpenAI’s AI models, but left the partnership due to an in-house breakthrough, according to founder Brett Adcock in a Feb. 4 post on X.

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Figure is in talks to raise $1.5 billion in its latest round. The funding would catapult the startup’s value to $39.5 billion. Figure is developing both residential and commercial robots.

Robotics AI Competition

Figure joins an already crowded market for robotics AI, and it faces some big competitors.

Meta reportedly is forming a new team dedicated to developing humanoid robots powered by AI, according to Bloomberg. The team will function within its Reality Labs division, where metaverse development is going on. Marc Whitten, the former CEO of GM’s Cruise AV unit, will lead the team.

The company plans to focus on robots that can perform household chores, as well as AI, sensors and software that could be used by a variety of companies manufacturing and selling robots.

Google-funded Apptronik is another humanoid robotics competitor. Recently, it raised $350 million on a Series A funding round for further development and deployment of its general humanoid robot, Apollo. In December, it partnered with the Google DeepMind robotics team.

Meanwhile, Tesla has been building its own humanoid robots. CEO Elon Musk said at his earnings call in January that the company plans to build several thousand Optimus humanoid robots this year that can do “useful things.”

“Our goal is to ramp up Optimus production faster than maybe anything has ever been ramped,” Musk said. The internal target is to build several thousand robots this year and go up from there.

One difficulty is that Tesla has had to build robot motors, sensors and actuators from scratch. “Nothing worked for our humanoid robots, at any price,” Musk said. “We had to design everything from physics-first principles to work.”

The first robots will be deployed at Tesla factories, refined, and then readied for sale in mid- to late 2026. Once the manufacturing of robots ramp to more than 1 million a year, the price will be less than $20,000.

In the meantime, Tesla is still working on making Optimus more usable. “Obviously, there are many challenges with Optimus,” said Musk, who wants to see his robots play the piano and even thread a needle.

Other humanoid robot companies include Boston Dynamics, Sanctuary AI, 1X, Agility Robotics, Fourier Intelligence and RobotEra.

C-3PO Is a Ways Away

Jenny Shern, general manager at robot builder NexCOBOT, said humanoid robots face more complex challenges than industrial robots.

“Traditional industrial robotic arms with vision systems primarily rely on preprogrammed instructions to execute tasks. This works well in factory environments where applications are repetitive and goal-oriented,” she told PYMNTS.

However, “implementing humanoid robots into household settings is a more complex advancement because, unlike factories, household environments are highly dynamic, and tasks will vary significantly from one home to another,” Shern said.

In unpredictable settings, humanoid robots need AI to function effectively in daily life because preprogrammed instructions won’t be enough.

“Integrating AI to interpret human commands and dynamically generate task-specific actions is key to enabling real-world household applications,” Shern said.

“For example, [for] an AI-powered humanoid robot to ‘clean up the table,’ it would need to understand the context, recognize objects, and make a decision on what action — such as disposing of trash, placing perishable items in the refrigerator, and sorting non-perishable goods into a basket.”

Rodney Brooks, co-founder and CTO of Robust AI, said Figure’s robot demo showed just how superior humans are at picking up objects compared to machines.

“The human effortlessly reached into the paper bag, extracting each item one by one — often with only the slightest glimpse of each — then laid them out neatly on a pristine countertop,” Brooks told PYMNTS. “In contrast, the humanoid robots picked up the objects at a snail’s pace, about 10 to 20 times slower, despite having a clear, unobstructed view of them.

“Until we reach a point where two stationary-legged robots can manipulate objects with enough speed and efficiency to deliver a cost-effective, ROI-positive solution that businesses are willing to adopt at scale, I’ll remain skeptical about any so-called breakthrough in robotic picking technology.”