This AI humanoid robot helped assemble BMWs at US factory

Robots have been working in car factories for decades now, starting with machines performing some welds on a General Motors production line back in 1961. Now, robots work alongside people on production lines, excelling at tasks like manipulating parts too heavy for humans to easily lift or welding or bonding with more precision than we can manage.

Those robots mostly look like big multi-axis arms, but a new breed of two-armed, two-legged robots is being tested in car factories. BMW is the latest automaker to try them at its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Unlike Tesla, which hopes to develop its own bipedal ‘bot to work on its production line sometime next year, BMW has brought in a robot from Figure AI. The Figure 02 robot has hands with sixteen degrees of freedom and human-equivalent strength.

“We are excited to unveil Figure 02, our second-generation humanoid robot, which recently completed successful testing at the BMW Group Plant Spartanburg. Figure 02 has significant technical advancements, which enable the robot to perform a wide range of complex tasks fully autonomously,” said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI.

BMW wanted to test how to integrate a humanoid robot into its production process—how to have the robot communicate with the production line software and human workers and determine what requirements would be necessary to add robots to the mix.

The Figure robot was given the job of inserting sheet metal parts into fixtures as part of the process of making a chassis. BMW says this required particular dexterity and that it’s an ergonomically awkward and tiring task for humans.

Now that the trial is over, Figure’s robot is no longer working at Spartanburg, and BMW says it has “no definite timetable established” to add humanoid robots to its production lines. “The developments in the field of robotics are very promising. With an early-test operation, we are now determining possible applications for humanoid robots in production. We want to accompany this technology from development to industrialization,” said Milan Nedeljković, BMW’s board member responsible for production.