If you dread making your bed each morning, now robots may be able to do the job for you.
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In a video released Friday, two of Figure AI’s humanoids walk into a minimalist bedroom and begin tidying it up. One hangs up a coat, another closes a laptop, and hangs up headphones. Then they move to opposite sides of the bed, adjust the pillows, and smooth the comforter into place.
The two humanoids coordinate the lifting, placing, and pulling back of the comforter through head nods and achieve a well-made bed in under two minutes.
In a blog post, Figure described the milestone as “an important first demonstration of a future we hope becomes common: intelligent humanoids coordinating with each other to solve shared goals in human environments.”
Making a bed may be a simple chore for people, but it is brutally hard for robots. Figure AI said three challenges make the task especially difficult.
First, two humanoids in one room are not simply two robots working in parallel: every action one robot takes needs to be understood by the other. Second, the comforter has no fixed shape or clear division between one robot’s side and the other’s. Each robot has to anticipate what the other will do and keep adjusting as the fabric folds, drapes, and slides under their grasp. Third, the robots have to move around the room and switch between tasks.
“To be clear, there’s no explicit messaging between these robots, they coordinate their actions fully visually, e.g. head nods,” Figure AI director of AI Corey Lynch wrote on X, emphasizing that the video was at 1x speed and that the robots operated fully autonomously, with no teleoperation.
Figure AI said it trained Helix 02, the model it introduced earlier this year, on new data so the robots could handle more complex tasks, including opening doors, pushing furniture, and draping clothing. It did not say when its humanoid will become available to consumers.
Figure AI has raised more than $1 billion and is valued at $39 billion. The company faces stiff competition from Tesla, which is developing its own humanoid robot, Optimus.
Last year, Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock announced that the company was no longer collaborating with OpenAI, an investor in Figure AI, on the development of AI models for robots. Adcock ended the partnership after less than a year, after OpenAI told him that it planned to pursue humanoids internally.
Adcock has said he’s working toward “building a new species” of robots that can reproduce and share knowledge with each other.
“I think it will happen in our lifetime,” he said last year.
Other startups are also training robots to do chores. For example, AI training startups like Encord and Micro1 say they’re seeing a surge in demand from robotics companies seeking high-quality training data — and creating it requires people to film themselves performing tasks like folding laundry or loading dishwashers.
