“Newly manufactured F.03 robots leaving BotQ and heading across campus.” That’s the whole caption Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder and CEO, put on a 19-second clip of humanoids filing out of a building, past parked cars and over a crosswalk.
BotQ is Figure’s own robot factory. The clip shows the last step of its line: finished Figure 03s leaving on foot, one behind the other. The production numbers behind that walk are the bigger story.
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Available: Business customers only
US alternative: Unitree R1 Air at Amazon ($6,890)
BotQ’s Production Line
In its April production update, Figure said BotQ had delivered over 350 Figure 03s and gone from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days. That’s a 24x jump, run by Figure’s own manufacturing software across more than 150 networked workstations.
Every robot gets over 80 functional tests before sign-off, including burn-in sessions of squats, shoulder presses and jogging at thousands of reps to shake out early failures.
The yield numbers were moving too. End-of-line first-pass yield had passed 80% and was improving weekly. The battery line was at 99.3% with more than 500 packs shipped, and BotQ had built over 9,000 actuators.
How many robots can BotQ build a year?
Up to 12,000, by Figure’s numbers. That’s the capacity of BotQ’s first-generation line from the Figure 03 launch, next to a goal of 100,000 robots over four years.
Real output is slower. Adcock marked the 1,000th Figure 03 on July 23, so BotQ built fewer than 650 robots in the 12 weeks after the 350 mark. That’s under eight a day. One an hour, around the clock, would be 24.
Even flat out at one an hour, the line tops out at 8,760 robots a year. And 100,000 in four years means averaging 25,000 a year, about double what the first line was built for. The walk clip came with no new count.
Where the Robots Go
Figure says BotQ robots go to in-house research, data collection, end-to-end housework and commercial jobs. Every hour a robot runs feeds data back into Helix, Figure’s robot AI.
Two customers are public. In June, Figure 03 arrived at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, picking thin-walled parts into sequence in Hall 52 and pulling a heavy parts cart down the line. In May, Figure signed a commercial deal with Catalyst Brands, the owner of JCPenney, Aéropostale and Brooks Brothers, starting at its Reno, Nevada distribution center. Neither announcement gave a robot count.
Did the robots walk out on their own?
Figure hasn’t said. The caption gives no count, no destination and no word on whether the robots were autonomous or supervised.
The software for it exists. Figure’s April update describes a fleet management system that coordinates robots autonomously across jobs and tracks each one’s health and location. The same update gave Helix’s walking controller camera vision, and Figure says it now climbs real stairs using only what it learned in simulation. Before that, stairs and ramps needed hand-tuned mode switches and an operator.
Some replies to the clip picked on the gait, which looks careful rather than quick.
Figure 03 Hardware
Figure 03 stands 5 feet 8 inches, weighs 61 kg (about 134 pounds) and carries 20 kg (44 pounds). Top walking speed is 1.2 meters a second, roughly 2.7 mph, and a 2.3 kWh battery built into the torso runs it for 5 hours at peak performance.
It charges at 2 kW through coils in its feet, so it just steps onto a wireless stand. Each hand has a palm camera for when the head cameras can’t see. The fingertip sensors register as little as 3 grams, about the weight of a paperclip.
The body is wrapped in washable textile covers that come off without tools, with foam at the pinch points. Realbotix’s Echo, the humanoid you can reserve right now, doesn’t walk at all.
Figure doesn’t sell Figure 03 to the public, but Unitree’s 4-foot R1 Air humanoid is $6,890 on Amazon.
Price: Not for sale
Available: Business customers only
US alternative: Unitree R1 Air at Amazon ($6,890)
Watch the next production count, not the next walking clip. A thousand robots by July against a 12,000-a-year line says BotQ is built and still nowhere near full.
