Figure says Helix‑02 can run full eight‑hour factory shifts autonomously

Figure AI said on May 13 that its humanoid robots had completed full eight-hour factory shifts autonomously, extending the company’s recent claims about Helix-02 from short household and logistics demonstrations to a full workday. The startup made the claim in a post and livestream highlighted by media reports this week, saying a team of robots operated at “human performance levels” without human intervention. Figure has not published a detailed technical paper or third-party audit of the eight-hour run on its website as of May 14. The announcement nevertheless adds to a string of public demonstrations the company has used to argue its robots are moving from lab tests to sustained industrial work. ### What exactly did Figure say it showed on May 13? Figure AI said in its May 13 post that viewers could “watch a team of humanoid robots running a full 8-hr shift at human performance levels,” and described the run as “fully autonomous” using Helix-02. Media reports citing the post said the live feed showed robots handling packages in a factory-style setting over the course of a full shift. Figure’s own website does not yet appear to host a standalone write-up of that specific eight-hour factory demonstration. (interestingengineering.com) May 13 is also the date attached to outside coverage describing the event as a live online demonstration rather than a pre-edited highlight reel. That matters because Figure has often introduced new capabilities through tightly produced videos on its news page, while this time the company’s claim centered on continuous operation over a standard workday. (interestingengineering.com) ### How does Helix-02 fit into that claim? Figure introduced Helix-02 on January 27 as a system that extends control from the upper body to the full robot, combining walking, manipulation and balance in one continuous neural system. The company said Helix-02 can run “long-horizon” tasks directly from onboard sensing, and described a four-minute dishwasher task completed with no resets and no human intervention. (interestingengineering.com) Figure said the system connects vision, touch and proprioception to all of the robot’s actuators through a unified visuomotor network. The company also said “System 0,” its learned whole-body controller, was trained on more than 1,000 hours of human motion data and replaced 109,504 lines of hand-engineered C++ with a learned control prior. Those are company descriptions rather than independently verified benchmarks. (figure.ai) ### Has Figure shown related tasks before this week? Figure’s public materials show a steady progression of demonstrations before the May 13 claim. On February 26, 2025, the company said Helix was being applied to logistics package manipulation and triaging, a use case it framed as requiring human-level speed and precision. On August 12, 2025, Figure said the same model had demonstrated an hour of fully autonomous package reorientation in a logistics setting. (figure.ai) March 9 and May 8 brought household examples. Figure said Helix-02 completed whole-body living-room cleanup in March, then said two Helix-02-equipped humanoids reset a bedroom in under two minutes in a May 8 post. Those demonstrations were shorter and more choreographed than an eight-hour factory shift, but they show the company using the same autonomy stack across logistics and home tasks. (figure.ai) ### What has Figure said about real factory work before now? Figure said in a November 19, 2025 post that its Figure 02 robots contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. The company’s deployment highlights said those robots ran 10-hour shifts Monday through Friday, loaded more than 90,000 parts and logged more than 1,250 hours of runtime. That post did not present the BMW deployment as the same fully autonomous Helix-02 setup now being promoted. (figure.ai) The distinction is important because Figure’s latest claim is not just about endurance. It is specifically about autonomy during a full shift, at what the company calls human performance levels, in a live demonstration. Figure has not, in the materials surfaced here, published a third-party measurement of throughput, intervention rate or error rate for the May 13 run. (figure.ai) ### How fast is Figure trying to scale from demos to deployment? Figure said on April 29 that its BotQ manufacturing facility had delivered more than 350 third-generation humanoid robots and increased production from one Figure 03 robot per day to one per hour in under 120 days. The company said in a March 15, 2025 post that BotQ’s first-generation manufacturing line was designed for up to 12,000 humanoids per year. (interestingengineering.com) September 16, 2025 is the date Figure said it had raised more than $1 billion in committed Series C capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation. The company said the funding would support deployment of general-purpose humanoid robots in real-world environments at scale. April 29 is the latest concrete milestone on Figure’s own site beyond this week’s shift claim: BotQ had delivered more than 350 Figure 03 units, and the company said production had risen to one robot per hour. (figure.ai 1) (figure.ai 2)