Sourcery

Figure’s Humanoid Factory Tour – CEO Brett Adcock

22 snips
May 1, 2026
Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure and leader of their humanoid robotics and Helix AI efforts. He tours Figure’s labs, manufacturing, and design studio. Topics include Helix neural policies replacing hand-coded control, reinforcement-learning stability tests like the Vulcan project, autonomous home tidying by Figure 03, and the BotQ assembly and battery safety lines.
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INSIGHT

One Humanoid For Many Jobs

  • Figure targets a single general-purpose humanoid body to amortize hardware across tasks from housework to manufacturing.
  • Brett Adcock says one robot can run diverse apps (dishes, laundry, logistics) by loading a new neural-net policy rather than new hardware.
INSIGHT

Neural First Control Strategy

  • Figure moved from hand-coded controllers to a neural network policy called Helix that maps pixels to joint actions at 50–200ms intervals.
  • Adcock argues written code couldn't scale across 40+ joints and vast state space, so Helix runs onboard for real-time control.
ADVICE

Simulate Edge Cases Before Deployment

  • Train robustness by simulating real-world failures and domain randomization so controllers transfer to real robots.
  • Moritz and Brett highlight physics sims with gravity and friction to cover edge cases before zero-shoting to hardware.
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