Figure fast-tracks humanoid robots for the home

Most humanoid robots are stuck doing hard labor in factories, but Figure is getting ready to send its metal workers home much earlier than planned.

Figure CEO Brett Adcock just announced that the robotics startup is pulling forward its home robotics timeline by two years, with alpha testing for the Figure 02 robot set to kick off in home environments later in 2025.

Dropping OpenAI to move faster solo

Adcock says this accelerated timeline is directly driven by Helix, the company’s new generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model.

Helix processes visual data and natural language simultaneously, letting the robot pick up new physical tasks much faster than before. In recent demos, Figure showed robots handling household chores like meal prep, with Helix orchestrating two robots working together on a single task.

What makes this push fascinating is the timing. Earlier this month, Figure officially parted ways with OpenAI, walking away from their high-profile partnership to focus entirely on proprietary internal AI models like Helix.

Up until now, Figure has focused primarily on industrial settings. In early 2024, the company put its humanoids into a BMW plant in South Carolina to test real-world factory work, where environments are structured and funding is reliable.

The messy reality of the living room

Industrial plants make perfect sense for early robotics: flat concrete floors, controlled lighting, and predictable human workflows.

Living rooms are a nightmare by comparison. Homes come with unpredictable floor transitions, scattered toys, stairs, and unpredictable pets and children. While Tesla and Apptronik have teased home robots, almost everyone deprioritized domestic chores in favor of enterprise pilots, leaving Norway’s 1X as one of the few focusing directly on the consumer home.

Figure stamping this rollout as an alpha test makes it clear: the Figure 02 won’t be cleaning your kitchen anytime soon, but real-world home trials are officially beginning.

Why it matters

If you were hoping to buy an AI butler this holiday season, keep waiting. An alpha test means Figure is likely deploying these robots inside carefully monitored, very limited real-world homes, and consumer availability is still a distant milestone.

However, this is a massive flex for Figure's post-OpenAI roadmap. By cutting ties with OpenAI and immediately moving up home testing by two years, Figure is betting that its own in-house Helix platform can solve real-world generalization faster than general LLM providers can.

We think Adcock's push is undeniably ambitious, but running tests inside a home introduces massive safety and liability risks that automotive plants never had. Tackling the hardest environment first could either cement Figure as the leader in embodied AI, or expose just how far humanoids still are from folding laundry reliably.