Humanoid robots are no longer the stuff of factory floors.
At Figure AI, the company that released it, Figure 03 is a general-purpose robot designed to complete daily household chores — such as folding clothing, rinsing dishes, moving mugs into a dishwasher, and watering plants, as well as tidying rooms — but without remote control and no set order of tasks.
General-purpose design for real-time household control
Central to Figure 03 is Helix, the in-house AI control system of Figure AI. Instead of following a preprogrammed sequence, Helix sees the scene, analyzes it, and adjusts on the fly. The company used to rely on third-party foundation models, but now focuses on an in-house stack that has been designed to tackle long-horizon, multi-turn tasks inside unstructured spaces like kitchens and laundry rooms.
The robot is about 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs about 132 pounds, and can operate for as long as five hours on a single charge with conductive wireless charging through its feet. New palm cameras in the base (one on each hand) provide close-up views within 5 cm of an object being manipulated, enabling visual perception when cameras are blocked by cabinets, countertops, and clutter. That combination — high-skill sensing in the hands plus whole-body perception — is the next stage in closing the loop on reliably manipulatable everyday objects.
What Figure 03 can accomplish in real homes today
In video demonstrations, Figure 03 visually senses a cup and plate in the living space, transports them to the sink for rinsing, then puts them in the dishwasher.
It also folds and waters plants, while navigating furniture and other household obstacles. Brett Adcock, the founder of Figure, has been careful to note that the demos are not teleoperated, and we are seeing a move toward true autonomy rather than staged teasers.
There were so many wrinkles that it was almost suspect.
Domestic work is a strict test-drive for humanoids: floors are never flat, lighting changes constantly, and objects appear on repeat in endless variety. The situation is trickier with deformable items like towels and shirts, which, because their shape can’t be predicted or categorized, must be sorted by hand. Groups at places like Berkeley and Stanford, along with some at Carnegie Mellon, have for years pointed out that there is a gulf between lab-grade manipulation and actual homes. Figure’s demos indicate that gap is shortening, though mass reliability across homes will be the true measuring stick.
Under the hood: Helix AI and new onboard sensors
Helix intertwines perception, planning, and control in a single, inseparable loop. Palm cameras really stand out as an upgrade; they give the most tactile-adjacent use of vision where it counts: at the contact point. By providing feedback at close range, the robot can adjust grasps on the fly, like aligning a mug for use in a rack or pinching the corner of a T-shirt without scrumpling it up. Helix keeps track of its surroundings even when they are occluded, which is a common failure mode for most robots: losing objects or tools when they go out of view due to an obstruction like hands or cabinets.
Another matter of practice is power management. A 5-hour control period, as well as autonomous recharges using a charging plate (a.k.a. wireless charging), mean lots of chore sessions without needing any human input. For households, uptime and decibel levels are as important as raw power. Though Figure hasn’t posted decibel specs or full-cycle task timing, the focus on sustained autonomy is the metric that matters for home usefulness.
Price, availability, and the Figure 03 rollout roadmap
No pricing or retail release has been announced by Figure. Figure 03 can be manufactured at “lower cost than previous versions,” and will initially be put into service with certain partners for their testing and validation purposes. Speaking with Time magazine, Adcock detailed the ambitions to make this as useful across a household as possible in the near term, but noted that autonomy when it comes to “most things in your home” is an ongoing engineering push.
Like any new category, the critical questions are cost per hour of useful work, reliability over months of use, and serviceability. That will eventually determine whether humanoids graduate from test pilots to the mainstream home.
From Home Help to Commercial Assistance
Figure 03 is also prepared for commercial work. Company footage includes:
- Delivery of packages
- Assisting on an assembly line
- Serving in a restaurant
The jobs question is real. Figure’s Master Plan pitches humanoids as the solution to eliminate dirty and dangerous jobs, with the human part of humanity able to seek out better work. Labor economists and robotics experts say the near-term effects will depend on total cost of ownership and regulation to ensure safety, particularly in public-facing areas.
How Figure 03 stacks up to rival humanoid robots
Figure 03 enters a burgeoning field. After a few minutes of attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible picture, I learned that Agility Robotics’ Digit was designed for bipedal mobility and tote handling in warehouses. Tesla’s Optimus has exhibited controlled demonstrations of household chores as well as precision handwork. Apptronik’s Apollo and Sanctuary AI’s Phoenix also spotlight dexterous manipulation for industrial applications. In that world, Figure’s differences are its home-first demonstrations, palm-embedded cameras for occlusion-resistant grasping, and visual shift to an inbuilt proprietary AI control stack.
What any of these platforms will need to achieve is repeatability — loading dishwashers, folding laundry in thousands of different homes rather than in some lab kitchen. If Figure can turn its demos into durable, reasonably priced performance, the notion of a robot that does the dishes and folds your clothes might shift from gimmick to game-changer.
