Home Humanoid: Google DeepMind Shows Apptronik’s Robot Doing Real-World Tasks

The latest hardware and software is getting much better at demonstrating that promise. Figure, which has shown its humanoid robot running smoothly and gracefully, has also shown Figure dealing with typical home challenges: putting dishes in the dishwasher, putting groceries away, and so on. The pace of development has massively accelerated in the past two years thanks to better AI, better hardware, and cheaper components. If this most recent lab-based demo proves durable in the real world, it signals something fairly consequential. DeepMind and Apptronik are fusing high-quality humanoid hardware and foundation-model intelligence into a general-purpose robot that can perform a broad range of everyday physical tasks with minimal retraining. The result, potentially, could be the long-imagined “universal robot worker:” a cost-effective machine that can understand instructions, plan multi-step procedures, adapt to new objects and execute tasks with near-human dexterity.