Nvidia is touting the work of Figure, a robotics and AI start-up that it invested in earlier this year. In an Nvidia blog post, the companies showcased the next-generation Figure 02 conversational humanoid robot, which leverages generative AI models trained on Nvidia H100 GPUs to power its inference capabilities.
Development of the Figure 02 robot also was accelerated with the help of the Nvidia Issac Sim reference application, part of the company’s Omniverse platform, allowing it to be unveiled just 10 months after Figure launched its first-generation humanoid robot. Figure 02 recently was tested for data collection and use-case training at BMW Group’s Spartanburg, South Carolina, production line.
“Our rapid progress, marked by advances in speech, vision, dexterity and computational power, brings us closer to delivering humanoid robots to address labor shortages for many industries,” said Figure CEO Brett Adcock, in a statement.
The robot uses an Nvidia RTX GPU-based module on board for inference, with the blog post stating that the module helps it achieve “3x inference gains for handling fully autonomous real-world AI tasks compared with the robot’s first iteration.” The post added, “New human-scale hands, six RGB cameras, and perception AI models trained with synthetic data generated in Isaac Sim enable Figure 02 to perform high-precision pick-and-place tasks required for smart manufacturing applications.”
The blog post on Figure came just a week after Nvidia announced a new Humanoid Robot Developer Program, along with NIM Microservices for Robotics Simulation in Isaac Lab and Isaac Sim, during the SIGGRAPH 2024 event in Denver. Also at that event, Nvidia unveiled OSMO, a cloud-native managed service that allows users to orchestrate and scale complex robotics development workflows across distributed computing resources, whether on premises or in the cloud. It is all part of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described as an effort to advance the company’s robotics stack.
Figure announced a $675 million funding round back in February of this year that included participation from Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and others. The company is part of the Nvidia Inception program for start-ups, and also was listed as one of the initial members of the new Humanoid Robot Developer Program.