Figure released a video showing its humanoid robot Figure 02 folding towels completely autonomously – without any teleoperation or pre-programmed commands. Instead, it relies solely on its proprietary neural architecture called Helix.
The footage clearly shows Figure 02 grasping, folding, and stacking towels neatly in real household conditions – inside the company founder’s home, without special sensors or controlled lab environments. This marks the first time a robot with multifunctional hands has performed such a task without human assistance.
Technically, the achievement was enabled by the Helix VLA model combined with 500 additional hours of human motion demonstrations. This allowed the robot to make a major leap – from industrial warehouse tasks to household chores like laundry folding. Its multi-fingered hands enable it to find fabric corners, track edges, align folds, and automatically react to slipping or crumpling materials.
Why does this matter? Figure accomplished all this using the same Helix model that recently worked a 20-hour shift at BMW’s Spartanburg factory – without extra programming or retraining. Only 500 new hours of demonstration data were needed. This proves the system can generalize skills and transition from industrial to domestic settings simply by expanding the examples it learns from.
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