A couple of weeks ago, we watched in awe as Figure’s humanoid robot grabbed clothes from a laundry basket before deftly depositing them in a washer. It was all very impressive.
In a follow-up that offers a glimpse of a future where humans can finally ignore this wretched chore, Figure has shared another video showing the same robot folding freshly washed towels before placing them in a pile.
The California-based tech company said it’s the first humanoid robot capable of folding laundry “fully autonomously,” a statement that will surely cause millions of people around the world to call out at once: “So where can I get one?” Well, more on that later.
To conduct the process, Figure 02 uses the same Helix Vision Language Action (VLA) model that the company has already deployed for industrial logistics tasks, but now with a new dataset for laundry folding.
To be clear, the robot performs the laundry task without teleoperation or specialized hand-coded instructions, relying instead on an end-to-end neural network.
As you can see, the robot uses multi-fingered hands to competently pick towels from a pile. It also performs different folding strategies, recovers from errors such as grabbing multiple towels at once, and carries out fine manipulations — just like a human.
The video demonstrates real advances in one of the areas that robotics engineers still find extremely challenging: manipulation of objects, especially soft, flexible ones. Indeed, the robot’s impressive ability to handle the humble towel looks like an exciting step toward such machines being able to cope with other non-rigid items, opening them up to a plethora of other tasks in a broader range of settings.
“Folding laundry sounds mundane for a person, but this is one of the most challenging dexterous manipulation tasks for a humanoid robot,” Figure said in a post on its website. “Towels are deformable, constantly changing shape, bending unpredictably, and prone to wrinkling or tangling. There’s no fixed geometry to memorize, and no single ‘correct’ grasp point. Even a slight slip of a finger can cause the material to bunch or fall. Success requires more than just seeing the world accurately — it demands fine, coordinated finger control to trace edges, pinch corners, smooth surfaces, and adapt in real time.”
While Figure is currently focused on deploying its humanoid robot in industrial locations, it will — tantalizingly for all of those laundry haters out there — begin testing it in home settings this year.
Figure has yet to mention pricing and other purchasing details for individual customers, so for the time being at least, the laundry will continue as a regular chore for most folks. But this humanoid robot certainly offers hope …
