Figure 02 Just Loaded the Dishwasher
Figure’s humanoid Figure 02 (F02) just completed a full, end-to-end dishwasher-loading task on its own—seeing messy dishes, planning grasps, opening racks, placing items, and closing up, another household milestone after recent laundry and washer-loading demos. It’s a small chore with big implications for general-purpose robotics in the home.
What Figure showed today
In a new demo posted by Figure, F.02 performs the entire dishwasher routine autonomously: perceiving dish geometry, selecting stable grasps with its five-finger hands, articulating the lower/upper racks, and placing plates, bowls, and cups without teleoperation. While short, the clip highlights reliable rack manipulation (a common failure point) and repeatable placements—a level up from pick-and-place on a static counter. Watch the demo on Figure’s X account.
Why this is hard (and important)
Loading a dishwasher combines several tricky ingredients:
Visual reasoning in clutter: Identify category, orientation, and placement affordances among mixed, reflective objects.
Bi-manual coordination: Pull rack → stabilize → place → push, all while keeping balance.
Contact-rich manipulation: Gentle force control to avoid chatter, slips, and rim collisions.
Stringing these sub-skills together without hand-coded scripts is the frontier: an autonomous policy that generalizes across layouts, dishes, and lighting, not just a single choreographed scene. Recent laundry-folding and washer-loading runs suggest Figure is scaling its Helix Vision-Language-Action stack across home tasks.
The tech context
Figure positions F.02 as a fully autonomous humanoid with on-board perception and reasoning (Helix), leveraging a multi-camera array and conversational interfaces. Official specs list a 5'6" form factor, ~20 kg payload, ~70 kg weight, ~5 hr runtime, and ~1.2 m/s top speed—squarely in the “human-scale” manipulation regime.
On the industrial side, F.02 has already appeared in BMW factory trials, inserting delicate sheet-metal parts—evidence that the same control stack can swing between factories and homes. That duality is the real story: one robot class, many chores.
How close is this to your kitchen?
Reality check:
Generalization: Today’s clip shows one dishwasher in one kitchen. The bar is robust performance across brands, racks, and dish shapes.
Speed & reliability: Acceptable “household speed” and low failure rates will matter more than single-shot success.
Integration: Voice-first UX (“load the dishwasher and start cycle”), safe operation near kids/pets, and appliance cooperation (handles, sensors) are the next hurdles.
Still, a year of quickening home-task demos—washer loading, towel folding, now dishwashers—signals that contact-rich autonomy is escaping the lab.
What to watch next
Task packs: End-to-end “kitchen packs” (clear table → scrape → load → start).
Graceful failure: How F.02 recovers from slips, occlusions, or weird utensils.
Ecosystem moves: Partnerships with appliance makers for robot-friendly racks and handles.
Pricing & availability: Figure began revenue pilots with F.02 in late 2024; broader home pilots will hinge on cost and service models.
Bottom line
The dishwasher demo is more than a flashy chore; it’s a compact proof that general manipulation, seeing, deciding, doing, can chain together reliably in real homes. If these capabilities keep stacking, “do the dishes” becomes “do the house.” And that’s when humanoids move from novelty to necessity.
