We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot. F.02 marked many firsts for the company: our first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, our first robot doing household chores, and our first logistics deployment. As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense.
Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task. We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware. Disassembling each robot would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04.
So we asked the internet: what should we do? The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them. We reached out to Arnold, and when he said he wanted to be involved, we put everything in motion. None of the metal foundries we contacted in the US and Mexico would let us jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment. In the end, the only place in the world we could find willing to take this on was a foundry in Imatra, Finland.
Training began at the Figure campus in San Jose. The team had just 24 hours and six melts to get it right. After the F.02 melt in Finland, we sent the resulting metal bars back to the US. That metal is now being machined into a limited series of artifacts commemorating F.02.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing