BMW will soon welcome a new robot into its workforce at one of its plants. The robot in question is Figure 1, a robot designed and created by Figure to learn jobs and complete them. The robot has seen some great success learning how to do little jobs, like making coffee, and it will soon start working alongside BMW’s workforce to build automotive vehicles (via New Atlas).
Figure unveiled the first of its humanoid robots back in October, garnering quite a bit of intrigue with what it planned to do from there on. Several days ago, the company followed up that debut with a new video showcasing Figure 1 doing one of the more mundane tasks in life, making a cup of coffee using a Keurig.
Figure says that its humanoid robot learned how to make a cup of coffee in a Keurig just by watching videos, and the video claims that it only took around 10 hours of training to pull off the feat. Further, Figure 1 reportedly learns how to correct small mistakes, which is showcased at the end of the video, when we see it moving the coffee pod around to fit it correctly into the machine.
Of course, the big news here is that this humanoid robot will be joining the workforce at BMW’s Spartanburg plant. The robots have already begun training for the staged deployment, and are expected to join the force there within the next couple of months.
The goal of Figure’s robot, and others like it, is to make some tasks at factories more autonomous so that the humans on hand can focus on the more important bits of the job. They can all work together to create a more efficient worksite, and it will be interesting to see where Figure 1 fits into BMW’s workforce going forward.
The companies haven’t yet announced exactly what Figure 1 will be doing on the BMW factory floor, but there will seemingly be a lot more work involved than the things that Boston Dynamic’s robot dogs have been doing for the past few years.
