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(Original title: "The strongest humanoid robot on earth" unveiled: visual & voice reasoning capabilities, working 20+ hours a day)

Cailianshe News, August 6 (Editor: Shi Zhengcheng)On Tuesday morning, local time, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI invested inHumanoidrobotStar enterprise Figure released its latest humanoid robot Figure 02 as scheduled. Based on the all-round upgrade of onboard computing power and various components, AI humanoid robots have taken another big step towards "working in factories".

By the way, withAIThe leap forward of large models,This AI device, which has been called "the most powerful humanoid robot on earth" by many media, hasVisionreasoningThe ability to communicate through chat – the default UI for operating the bot is voice control.

What are the highlights of the new product?

Compared with the first generation product released in 2023,Figure 02 The most obvious difference is the complete reconstruction of the appearance——The robot completely adopts an exoskeleton structure (the outer skin bears the load and pressure), and the robot's power supply and computing power wiring are integrated inside the body, which improves the robot's reliability and makes the packaging tighter.

(The appearance of the two generations of products is significantly different, source: Figure)

Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure, revealed,The company also re-customized the wire terminals and connectors for this design.

Of course, the most critical upgrade point for humanoid robots is still how to piece together a vivid "working (robot)" from a bunch of wires, chips and algorithms.

Company disclosures,Figure 02 is equipped with a total of 6 RGB cameras, located on the head, chest and back, so this robot also has "superhuman" vision.

With the input image data, the robot canVisionThe system perceives and understands the real physical world.Figure 02 is equipped with an onboard Vision Language Model (VLM), enabling it to perform fast commonsense visual reasoning.。

Adcock said that compared with the previous generation of products,Figure 02: Onboard computing and AI reasoning capabilities tripled, enabling many real-world AI tasks to be performed completely autonomously. The company's AI data engine will continuously provide the latest models for the robot to run on the local GPU.

In addition to vision,Figure 02 also uses a speech-to-speech reasoning model customized by OpenAI, an investor of the company., communicate with humans through the onboard microphone and speaker. Adcock also revealed that the robot's default UI is voice.

Although AI real-time voice chat is no longer an eye-catching new feature after the competition between Google and OpenAI, the application of this technology is still of great significance to humanoid robots. After all, sooner or later, this 70-kilogram block of iron will "screw" with humans under the same roof, and being able to respond to voice commands will be an important safety tool for humans.

Figure did not provide clear information on connectors, which are of most concern to investors. The company only said,The fourth-generation robot on Figure 02 has 16 degrees of freedom and has the same strength as humans, and can complete many tasks similar to those of humans.At the same time, the mechanical, electrical, control and sensor designs of the entire robot are all completed in-house.

Finally, this robot has a subtle but important upgrade.The battery capacity inside the robot has been increased by 50% to 2.25KWhAdcock explained that the design is intended to maximize the robot's operating time.The company hopes that Figure 02 will enable more than 20 hours of effective working time per day.

It is worth mentioning that the parameter description column on the company's official website shows that the battery life of Figure 02 is only 5 hours. It is reasonable to infer that the time provided by Adcock should be the maximum working time of "charging + working".

Unfortunately, Figure has not yet announced a timetable for the widespread release of Figure 02, which only suggests that the public should not limit their imagination to "robots entering the factory to screw in screws".Combining the dexterity of the human form with advanced artificial intelligence, Figure 02 can perform a wide range of tasks in commercial applications and, in the near future, in the home.

Already "entering the factory"

As a pre-launch test, BMWcarThe assembly plant of the company has already accepted a group of Figure 02 "trainees". In addition to actively executing the procedures for automobile assembly, AI can also automatically identify and correct errors in learned behavioral habits.

BMW Group also issued a public statement on Tuesday saying that during the trial run at the Spartanburg plant in the United States, Figure 02 was engaged in the work of inserting sheet metal parts into specific devices.The robot must be extremely dexterous to do this jobThe BMW Group said:Using robots can save employees from having to perform clumsy, tiring tasks that are not ergonomically soundTogether with Figure, the Group is testing and evaluating how humanoid robots can be used safely in automotive production.

(Source: BMW official website)

Milan Nedeljković, member of the BMW Group’s Board of Management for Production, said that through early tests, the two parties are now identifying possible applications for humanoid robots in production.