We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot.
F.02 marked many firsts for the company: our first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, our first robot doing household chores, and our first logistics deployment. As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense.
Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task. We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware. Disassembling each robot would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04.
So we asked the internet: what should we do? The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them. We reached out to Arnold, and when he said he wanted to be involved, we put everything in motion.
None of the metal foundries we contacted in the US and Mexico would let us jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment. We even reached out to former MythBusters to help with the search. In the end, the only place in the world we could find willing to take this on was a foundry in Imatra, Finland.
Training began at the Figure campus in San Jose. We set up large airbags and started teaching robots to jump off the second floor of one of our buildings. Using movements from stunt artists as a reference, the team trained a new AI model in simulation that would let the robots jump accurately into a bucket of molten steel, at a foundry we had never visited.
At the foundry, three massive graphite electrodes power a 75-ton electric arc furnace to melt solid steel scrap. The team had just 24 hours and six melts to get it right, and each melt had only a 20-minute window before the molten steel cooled and formed a hard crust. Despite the extreme heat and electromagnetic fields, the robots ran their AI policies seamlessly, even as camera equipment and other electronics failed in this environment.
After the F.02 melt in Finland, we sent the resulting metal bars back to the US with a new purpose. That metal is now being machined into a limited series of artifacts commemorating F.02. Only a small number will be made, preserving a piece of Figure’s history in a compact package that you can own.
Most of the F.02 fleet is gone. Just a few remain in storage at HQ. With the help of Arnold Schwarzenegger and our film crew, we pulled off something pretty wild. In an age of AI-generated footage, it’s worth being clear: we really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel. We hope you enjoy the film.