A Billion Dollars in Funding: Figure’s Humanoid Robots

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ACTUATE 2025: 23–24 September 2025, SAN FRANCISCO

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IROS 2025: 19–25 October 2025, HANGZHOU, CHINA

Enjoy today’s videos!

A billion dollars is a lot of money. And this is actual money, not just a valuation. but Figure already had a lot of money. So what are they going to be able to do now that they weren’t already doing, I wonder?

[ Figure ]

Robots often succeed in simulation but fail in reality. With PACE, we introduce a systematic approach to sim-to-real transfer.

[ Paper ]

Anthropomorphic robotic hands are essential for robots to learn from humans and operate in human environments. While most designs loosely mimic human hand kinematics and structure, achieving the dexterity and emergent behaviors present in human hands, anthropomorphic design must extend to also match passive compliant properties while simultaneously strictly having kinematic matching. We present ADAPT-Teleop, a system combining a robotic hand with human-matched kinematics, skin, and passive dynamics, along with a robotic arm for intuitive teleoperation.

[ Paper ]

This robot can walk without any electronic components in its body, because the power is transmitted through wires from motors concentrated outside of its body. Also, this robot’s front and rear legs are optimally coupled and can walk with just four wires.

[ JSK Lab ]

Thanks, Takahiro!

Five teams of Los Alamos engineers competed to build the ultimate hole-digging robot dog in a recent engineering sprint. In just days, teams programmed their robot dogs to dig, designing custom “paws” from materials like sheet metal, foam, and 3D-printed polymers. The paws mimicked animal digging behaviors—from paddles and snowshoes to dew claws—and helped the robots avoid sinking into a 30-gallon soil bucket. Teams raced to see whose dog could dig the biggest hole and dig under a fence the fastest.

[ Los Alamos ]

This work presents UniPilot, a compact hardware-software autonomy payload that can be integrated across diverse robot embodiments to enable resilient autonomous operation in GPS-denied environments. The system integrates a multimodal sensing suite including lidar, radar, vision, and inertial sensing for robust operation in conditions where unimodal approaches may fail. A large number of experiments are conducted across diverse environments and on a variety of robot platforms to validate the mapping, planning, and safe navigation capabilities enabled by the payload.

[ NTNU ]

Thanks, Kostas!

KAIST Humanoid v0.5. Developed at the DRCD Lab, KAIST, with a control policy trained via reinforcement learning.

[ KAIST ]

I just like the determined little hops.

[ AgileX ]

I’m always a little bit suspicious of robotics labs that are exceptionally clean and organized.

[ PNDbotics ]

Er, has PAL Robotics ever actually seen a kangaroo…?

[ PAL ]

See Spots push. Push, Spots, push.

[ Tufts ]

Training humanoid robots to hike could accelerate development of embodied AI for tasks like autonomous search and rescue, ecological monitoring in unexplored places, and more, say University of Michigan researchers who developed an AI model that equips humanoids to hit the trails.

[ Michigan ]

I am dangerously close to no longer being impressed by breakdancing humanoid robots.

[ Fourier ]

This, though, would impress me.

[ Inria ]

In this interview, Clone’s co-founder and CEO Dhanush Radhakrishnan discusses the company’s path to creating the synthetic humans straight out of science fiction.

(If YouTube brilliantly attempts to auto-dub this for you, switch the audio track to original [which YouTube thinks is Polish] and the video will still be in English.)

[ Clone ]

This documentary takes you behind the scenes of the HMND 01 Alpha release: the breakthroughs, the failures, and the late nights of building the U.K.’s first industrial humanoid robot.

[ Humanoid ]

What is the role of ethical considerations in the development and deployment of robotic and automation technologies, and what are the responsibilities of researchers to ensure that these technologies advance in ways that are transparent, fair, and aligned with the broader well-being of society?

[ ICRA@40 ]

Humanoids represent the most versatile robotic platform, capable of walking, manipulating, and collaborating with people in human-centered environments. Yet despite recent advances, building humanoids that can operate reliably in the real world remains a fundamental challenge. Progress has been hindered by difficulties in whole-body control, robust perceptive reasoning, and bridging the sim-to-real gap. In this talk, I will discuss how scalable simulation and learning can systematically overcome these barriers.

[ UPenn ]