F.02 Decommission
Figure AI decommissioned its F.02 robot fleet by melting them down in a specialized foundry in Finland. The company utilized AI-trained simulation models to guide the robots to jump into a furnace, ensuring the destruction of proprietary hardware.
Why it matters
This highlights the extreme measures companies take to protect intellectual property when retiring advanced robotics hardware.
We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot.
F.02 marked many firsts for the company: our first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, our first robot doing household chores, and our first logistics deployment. As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense.
Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task. We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware. Disassembling each robot would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04.
So we asked the internet: what should we do? The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them. We reached out to Arnold, and when he said he wanted to be involved, we put everything in motion.
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