{"id":74100,"date":"2025-08-17T02:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T02:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74100\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T02:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T02:49:09","slug":"wild-video-shows-humanoid-robot-effortlessly-folding-laundry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74100\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Video Shows Humanoid Robot Effortlessly Folding Laundry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, AI robotics firm Figure released a video<\/a> showing Figure 02, the company’s autonomous\u00a0humanoid robot powered by a visual language system called Helix, loading clothes into a laundry machine to be washed.<\/p>\n

Now, the company says that the robot has a new skill: folding laundry.<\/p>\n

Figure announced the capability in a blog post yesterday<\/a>, celebrating the news as a landmark event for the company and autonomous laundry frontiers writ large.<\/p>\n

The robot’s folding prowess, the company declared, marks the “first instance of a humanoid robot with multi-fingered hands folding laundry fully autonomously using an end-to-end neural network.”<\/p>\n

The firm shared a video<\/a> alongside the announcement, and we must admit: it’s pretty impressive. Though the bipedal robot looks a little bit awkward at times, it can be seen picking up unfolded hand towels, gingerly tucking them into neat rectangles, and gently piling the folded cloths into a wicker basket.<\/p>\n

While laundry might be a monotonous task for actual humans, Figure made sure to note<\/a> that the everyday chore represents “one of the most challenging dexterous manipulation tasks for a humanoid robot.”<\/p>\n

“Towels are deformable, constantly changing shape, bending unpredictably, and prone to wrinkling or tangling,” argued<\/a> Figure. “There’s no fixed geometry to memorize, and no single ‘correct’ grasp point. Even a slight slip of a finger can cause the material to bunch or fall.”<\/p>\n

The impressive demonstration highlights just how far the tech has come thanks to machine learning, hinting at a future where humanoid robots could be helping out with everyday tasks \u2014 that is, if you can afford to buy one.<\/p>\n

Figure also claims that its bot learned the skill without the company making any significant changes to Helix; on the contrary, it simply fed the model a new dataset. That’s important for the company as well as its potential customers. As it stands, building, training, and buying autonomous humanoids carries a hefty price tag<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s been a big year for Figure. Back in June, the company showed Figure 02 accurately sorting<\/a> through packages at a mail sorting facility. Impressive as the video was, it served as a reminder of the kind of human jobs that could soon be on the line<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And with CEOs frothing<\/a> at the mouth<\/a> to replace<\/a> human roles with AI, Figure’s latest demo is yet another sign that automation could soon be coming for both white and blue-collar jobs.<\/p>\n

In short, it’s not so much a question of if, but when.<\/p>\n

More on Figure: Watching This Humanoid Robot Sort Packages Is Quite Something<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month, AI robotics firm Figure released a video showing Figure 02, the company’s autonomous\u00a0humanoid robot powered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-74100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}