Figure has formally ended the operational life of its second-generation humanoid. In a deliberately Terminator-flavoured send-off, the company trained most of its F.02 fleet to walk itself into a 75-tonne electric-arc furnace at a foundry in Imatra, Finland, where the robots were melted down together with steel scrap, according to Figure's own account of the event.

The F.02 was Figure's workhorse: the first of the company's humanoids to work on a BMW factory floor and the first to run Helix, the company's own AI "brain", as well as the machine used for public demonstrations such as package sorting. It is now giving way to the F.03, the production-ready platform with tactile fingers, wireless charging and a redesigned body that Figure has been scaling for customer deployments.

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose Terminator films made the image of a machine sinking into molten metal a pop-culture staple, suggested the disposal method and took part in the filming; German media reported that one of the robots was driven into the furnace rather than walking in.

Figure said the metal recovered from the furnace was shipped back to the United States as bars. Setting the spectacle aside, the episode is a reminder of how fast humanoid hardware generations now turn over: a robot that counted as state of the art in the mid-2020s is scrap metal a generation later, and Figure is building its pitch to customers and investors around how quickly that cycle runs.

Sources