The robot in your kitchen
TIME
Two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. In slow movements, each gunmetal gray robot grabs a towel by its corners, flattens it out, folds it twice, and deposits it into the basket.
More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes.
Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again.
This was the scene inside the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning this year. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited.
Read more | TIME