Figure 2 and the future of Robotics

Soo, Figure (that’s the company name), the company behind the Figure 1 robot just released Figure 2, one of the most advanced robots so far. Here’s the announcement video

Now.. Here’s my personal take on this.

This is not the most advanced robot ever made. It is not necessarily the strongest, the fastest or the coolest looking. Okay. I take that back. It looks damn cool. The slim look, the screen on the face. Mm.. That artist was cooking.

But it still doesn’t take my crown for coolest looking robot. That title still belongs to Atlas 2, the robot by Boston Dynamics. Have you seen Atlas 2? Damn. That robot is cool as f. Here. Lemme find the video

Bruh.., Now THAT’s a robot. The way its movement is not limited to these conventional human norms (unlike figure and basically every other robot out there). The Boston Dynamics team is re-imagining robotic bodies. Not to mention how fast it moves. Have you seen that walking speed? Now imagine it running. That’s as darn cool robot.

That said, what i find super cool and impressive about Figure is the fact that their robots are powered by a single neural net, end to end. Figure might not be the most dextrous or the coolest looking but it sure as heck is one of the smartest.

This means that the entire robot, from input to output is powered by an AI system and the human input happens in natural language. This is in stark contrast to most other companies whose robots are tele-operated eg the Tesla Optimus Robot (Which BTW i am not even going to include here because those guys are under-performing. You are TESLA for fucks sake. You have the largest repository of real time driving data. You have the best batteries, you have tonnes of money. You’re telling me you can’t make one good robot that doesn’t need a human to tele-operate it? Smh, Elon. Tell your people they can do better).

There are very many Robotic companies. Each of them seems to be really really good at a specific thing. Figure is good at brain. Boston dynamics has perfected mobility and legs. (These guys are the ones who made Spot, the robotic dog. This one). So clearly, boston dynamics knows a thing or two about robot mobility.

Now. There’s a chinese company that has mastered robot arms.

If you think figure 2’s arms are impressive, check this out.

That robot is damn impressive. I do not know how they pull off that level of dexterity, but iriss what iriis.

It is sad that humans divide themselves into such silly little factions. SMH. Countries. Politics. All nonesense we make up to make our shitty existence on this blue marble even more shitty because we live for the drama and we’re naturally a very selfish species. Imagine if all these companies were working together. Like, even for 1 year. Imagine the advances we’d have in robotics by now.

Unfortunately, the way i see it, the only thing that could possibly get all our nations to unite is an extinction level threat. It would take an alien spaceship appearing in the sky, wiping out a couple of cities and declaring war on mankind. That’s when you’ll see governments working together. Orr something like “There is an asteroid heading for us. We need to save our planet”. We only decide to work together to defeat a common threat. It’s never “Let’s work together to build one another”. SMH.

But then again, i think it’s because all over the world, it’s very old people that are in charge of everything. They have a very rigid mindset. You know what they say. “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. Sigh

I get so maaaaddd whenever i see things like these. Figure 2 is so impressive but lacking in specific parts where another company is excelling. Why can’t they just collaborate, build something cool, take humanity forward?

This started out as a post about robots and it got so political so fast. Smh. Weeell, that’s what a raw mind dump looks like. I find these robots super cool and I get frustrated when i see us moving at a slug’s pace because of red tape and beaureaucracy (I hope i spelt that right. Damn. The spell checker wants to correct me but you know what, I’ll just leave it there. Because why not.)

I look forward to seeing what we’re going to have in about 1 year. Or even in 2 years. Let me make a bold prediction. Here’s what the state of robotics will be in 1 year.

1. A lot smarter
2. A lot faster
3. Programmable personalities. You know how when you are starting to use ChatGPT voice, you chose a voice, well, when you are setting up this robot, you’ll have to chose a personality and contune from there.
4. The chinese are going to have the best autonomous robots. Those guys are very many and they work together. There’s 1 billion of them working together to build cool stuff. This is why that 1 country scares America, Russia and everyone else. They have unity (or at least a rough approximation of it), which everyone else lacks.
5. Robots in the military. There will be robot dogs mounting machine guns and flame throwers (the flame thrower one is already there. It costs 200 USD).
6. Here’s the flame thrower one. Smh. Good idea guys. Let’s strap a flame thrower on the back of a robot. Why not. What’s the worst that could happen.

fun fact: Figure is powered by ChatGPT. A dumb choice in my opinion. They should use Claude. Much smarter, much faster and probably would give better output tokens and make the robot all round better. But hey, what do i know. I’m just a nerd on the internet.