Toward the rear of the office, an engineer is working on a metal hand. It looks human enough — roughly the same size with four fingers and a thumb. The Figure team is methodically testing every piece of their robot skeleton before piecing them all together to watch the prototype take its first steps — something founder and CEO Brett Adcock promises is mere days away.
The hand is opening and closing — one of those tasks an engineer needs to perform ad nauseum before moving onto more complex things like mobile manipulation. “This is pretty new,” says Adcock. “We started the first five-finger wiggles last week.”
One finger in particular is getting the most action. The executive apologizes. “We had a customer in here yesterday, and we did a demo,” he explains. “It was doing that every single time, and we were like, ‘huh, that’s weird.’ It’s just flipping them off. Everybody.”
It’s best not to read too much into such things — certainly not at this early a stage. T...
