The American company Figure for the development of humanoid robots signed a contract for their supply of products with one of the largest companies in the United States, and also announced its intention to release 100,000 such robots over the next four years, focusing on two key directions-on a commercial segment and home use .
Image Source: Figure
According to the General Director of Brett Adcock, cooperation with the largest customers will allow Figure to produce robots in large volumes, which will reduce their cost and accelerate data collection for artificial intelligence (AI). The first client of Figure, which was announced in December, is BMW, and the name of the second is still kept secret, writes Forbes.
Recently, Figure was recognized as one of the two leaders among 16 leading companies in the development of effective and affordable gumanoid robots. Their first Figure 01 robot was released only 31 months after the company’s foundation, the next model Figure 02 is already supplied to customers, and the Figure 03 robot, which is an even more impressive development and works in the laboratory.
According to Edkook, artificial intelligence plays a key role in the development of robots. “Last week, we began to use a neural network for the needs of a new client,” he said. “Learning with AI is the only possible way, since writing algorithms is impossible here.” He also emphasized that one of the main goals is the fulfillment by robots of tasks with high speed and performance. For comparison, the speed of Figure 01 is only 17 % of the speed of human movement, while Figure 02 is seven times faster than the first model. As for the third model, it will be even faster and more functional.
It is noted that the company is currently not striving for mass expansion of the client base. Her strategy consists in deepening cooperation with specific large clients. “In the commercial sector, our strategy is to remain focused on a small number of customers,” said Adkoc. “At an early stage, it is more efficient for us to grow vertically inside several customers than to offer products to many companies.”
Although Adkock did not call the second client Figure (the first to be BMW), according to him, “this is one of the largest companies in the United States”, from which it can be concluded that it may well be Walmart, Amazon or Apple, as well as large companies in the field healthcare, such as Unitedhealt Group and CVS Health.