Define pedantic. 
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Albaby you bring a lot of good information and make everyone understand all viewpoints on a subject, that I want to thank you for, but, in the end, we will just have to agree to disagree or this will never end and the squeeze just isn’t worth the juice.
Andy
Oh, I agree - I just wanted to end on a joke.
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Resuscitating an old thread, I was reminded of the conversation about Figure Robotics after coming across a news article about them the other day. We had talked about their announcement of a partnership with BMW, and about whether they would have their humanoid robots up for production by the end of 2024.
Anyway, Forbes dug into what that “partnership” really entailed. Turns out that for most of last year, all it involved was a single Figure test robot practicing picking things up and putting them back when the BMW plant wasn’t operating. More recently, they’ve progressed to that robot very slowly picking up three pieces of metal and putting it into a different place - but at least it’s while the plant is operating.
At the time, I reached out to BMW to try to get more details on the fleet of robots and what the end-to-end operations entailed. To my surprise, though, BMW spokesperson Steve Wilson said there was only a single Figure robot working in their South Carolina auto plant at any given time, and that the humanoid was picking up and maneuvering parts “during non-production hours.” When later pressed, Wilson would not say if these one-robot tests were due to there being just one solitary Figure humanoid at the factory, or if the carmaker had multiple Figure humanoids taking turns practicing tasks.
He added that “very soon, the Figure robot will begin loading parts for short intervals during live production,” but declined to offer a more specific timeline. This would be similar work to that which was being tested in off-hours, but in a real production environment.
The production-hours work that Figure’s humanoid would eventually do, Wilson explained, would involve a single robot performing a single task at any given time, in the plant’s body shop – where metal sheet panels are eventually assembled to form the vehicle’s chassis. According to Wilson, the robot would pick up “parts with two hands from a logistics container and place the parts onto a fixture” inside a contained work cell where another type of robot would “begin welding the parts together.” It sounded like a far more limited job than the “end-to-end operations” that Adcock said his droids were already doing.
Anyway, watching the video it’s hard to see any real value in using a humanoid robot to do this task - we’ve had robots that could do this for decades, and much much faster. But hey - they’re using a humanoid robot!
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