Figure’s Helix 2.5 Robot Completed Household Tasks in 30 Homes It Had Never Entered

Summary

Figure AI unveiled Helix 2.5 on September 17, a new AI control model for its humanoid robots that hit a 56% success rate at household chores across 30 Bay Area homes it had never trained in. The robot performed three tasks from scratch with no per-home fine-tuning: tidying living rooms, folding towels, and making beds. That 56% rate came from 237 successful completions out of 420 total attempts, compared to a 9% baseline from models trained without Figure’s new Index pretraining approach. Figure built Index by crowdsourcing home video data from a consumer app that has logged 16 million videos and 44,000 weekly active users.

Why it matters

A robot that walks into a stranger’s home and makes the bed more than half the time, without any customization, is a meaningful benchmark. You can’t buy this today. But results like these are what close the gap between research demos and products that actually ship to homes.

HTD Says

A robot that walked into 30 homes it had never trained in and successfully made the bed in more than half of them shows that the household-robot timeline is moving faster than most people realize. I covered a similar robot (also in the San Francisco area) focused on cleaning homes. It makes me wonder: are SF homes naturally dirty, or extremely well organized, which makes robotic cleaning more prescriptive?

The creepy factor still comes into play for me. First, my wife and I actually enjoy cleaning our home to the level we want it clean (typically better than most cleaning services, within reason). And who wants to pre-clean their home before the cleaning crew arrives?

But the point of this story is that “humanoid” robots are now entering unknown homes, scanning them, and having some success with simple cleaning tasks. I, like others, see this as more of a proof of concept. With more training data (similar to LLMs), the cleaning process could definitely improve. Or, like LLMs, the cleaning could get a bit repetitive and bland, but perhaps that is ok for cleaning: wash, rinse, repeat. Time will tell but until then, I’m still cleaning our home myself.

Source:

Figure.ai