In recent years we've seen robotics companies showcasing videos of extremely impressive but carefully edited humanoids, quick cuts, highlights, discarded attempts and highly controlled demonstrations and that always left a doubt hanging over the industry.

Can these robots really work continuously in the real world? Now Figure decided to try it in the riskiest way possible, live. The company began an 8-hour public broadcast showing a human robot from Figure 03, operating alone in an industrial environment without any human intervention. No cutting, no editing, no hiding flaws.

The robot appears on a belt line performing a seemingly simple task: identifying packages arriving on the belt and rotating them to correctly position the shipping labels, but when you observe the pace of the operations, you perceive that there is something important happening there. According to Brad Edcock, CEO of the figure, the system achieved something close to so-called human parity for this type of industrial task.

In the first 10 minutes of the transmission, the robot processed about 230 packages, maintaining an impressive average of about 2.6 seconds per item, and the objects are not standardized. There are rigid boxes, deformable packaging, plastic bags without colors and different formats continually arriving on the belt. That forces the system to recalculate movements in real time all the time.

The machine learns to react to the environment instead of just following rigid commands and that explains why live streaming became so important to the sector, because it also shows errors and one of the initial moments, the robot fails to turn a box correctly, leaving the package to continue down the belt with the label in the wrong position and interestingly that makes it more convincing because the real test is not operating perfectly, it is managing to continue functioning, even making the occasional mistake, without completely crashing the system, it's just that not everyone was impressed.

Part of the criticism on social networks arose precisely from the fact that the robot basically repeated the same task for hours. For some observers, it is still far from the idea of ​​truly general autonomy, capable of dealing with multiple unpredictable scenarios, as a human being would.

And that criticism makes sense, but it may ignore something important. What Figure seems to be trying to demonstrate here is not that his thefts are already replacing humans in everything. He is trying to demonstrate that these machines are finally beginning to withstand the repetitive and grueling grind of the real physical world. And perhaps most curious is to note that humanoids are no longer evolving just to work like us, but also to directly expand the human physical presence within the machines themselves.