Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Figure AI just gave a glimpse of Figure 02 humanoid’s laundry folding skills — without human help or scripts, just its Helix neural network nailing towel duty.

The same model that does heavy logistics now casually handles one of our most mundane chores. If it can pivot from warehouses to laundry baskets, what’s next?

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Figure 02 can now fold laundry

• Nvidia’s new Cosmos world models

• Sound-controlled swarms of microbots

• New robot wrist smoothly opens doors, jars

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

FIGURE

🧺 Figure 02 can now fold laundry

Image source: Figure

The Rundown: Figure just dropped a clip showing its Figure 02 robot folding laundry — autonomously, with no teleoperation or hardcoded programming — using nothing but its proprietary Helix neural architecture.

The details:

• The video shows Figure 02 neatly grasping, folding, and stacking towels without human assistance, a world first for a robot with multi-fingered hands.

• All folding was performed inside the home of Figure’s founder, without any special sensors or staged lab conditions.

• Figure pulled it off with its Helix VLA model using just 500 hours of new human demonstration data to jump from warehouse work to household chores.

• The robot’s hands feature multi-fingered dexterity and can trace edges, locate corners, smooth fabric, and adapt instantly to slips or wrinkling.

Why it matters: Figure achieved this using the same Helix model that recently worked a 20-hour shift at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, without any code changes or model retraining. All it took was 500 hours of fresh demo data. The result: a system that can generalize from warehouse tasks to homes just by being exposed to more examples.

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NVIDIA

🧠 Nvidia’s new Cosmos world models

Image source: Nvidia

The Rundown: Nvidia just dropped a robotics power-up at SIGGRAPH 2025: new Omniverse libraries and Cosmos world models to fast‑track physical AI, turning real‑world data into precision digital twins and smart autonomous agents.

The details:

• Nvidia has released Cosmos Reason, a 7B parameter VLM built to help robots plan, adapt, and act in the physical world.

• Also joining the current lineup is Cosmos Transfer‑2, a model designed to speed up synthetic data generation from 3D-simulation environments.

• The new RTX Pro Blackwell Servers and DGX Cloud are designed to support robotics development for tasks like training, simulation, and deployment.

• Nvidia also unveiled neural reconstruction libraries, plus a rendering method that uses sensor data to create 3D simulations of real-world environments.

Why it matters: Nvidia is making physical AI more accessible with faster tools for synthetic data and digital twin creation. The payoff could be shorter development cycles, safer robots, and a boost in industrial automation, opening high-end robotics to everyone from startups to global manufacturers.

SWARM BOTS

📢 Sound-controlled swarms of microbots

Image source: PennState

The Rundown: Penn State engineers have shown for the first time that sound waves can steer and coordinate swarms of micro‑robots, each just millimeters in size and equipped with a motor, tiny speaker, and microphone. 

The details:

• By “talking” and “listening” acoustically, these simple bots can synchronize movement, adapt to obstacles, and self‑organize into formations.

• When confronted with obstacles, damage, or changing environments, the robots can reform, heal their collective, and adapt on the fly.

• These self-organizing micro-machines could one day clean up pollution, deliver precision medicine, or probe dangerous, hard‑to‑reach places.

Why it matters: The system uses sound waves to let tiny robots communicate quickly, over long distances, and with little energy loss, an advantage over slower, less efficient chemical signals. Each robot is simple on its own, but together they can form flexible, resilient swarms for tasks in real-world settings based on current physics.

YALE UNIVERSITY

💡New robot wrist smoothly opens doors, jars

Image source: Yale University

The Rundown: Yale engineers just created the Sphinx Hand, a robotic gripper with a built‑in spherical mechanism that rotates objects in all directions without bulky wrist joints, letting robots work smoothly in tight spaces.

The details:

• The Sphinx integrates a spherical mechanism right into the hand that can grasp and rotate everyday objects in all three axes (roll, pitch, and yaw).

• That means twisting open jars, turning doorknobs, or screwing in lightbulbs, all without cameras, sensors, or elaborate control systems.

• The design eliminates the need for a robot to move its entire arm for object rotation, enabling faster and more efficient manipulation in tight spaces.

Why it matters: This pared-down yet elegant design brings robots closer to human-like utility. By fusing the job of gripping and rotating directly at the point of contact, the Sphinx avoids awkward arm movements and adapts smoothly to complex scenarios. Possible use cases: untangling ropes, opening packaging, or handling fragile items.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

DHL is investing £550M ($746M) to deploy over 1K new robots across its UK operations, expanding automation in e-commerce and healthcare logistics.

EngineAI unveiled the T-800, its first heavy-duty, full-sized humanoid, standing 1.85m tall and weighing 85 kg with 41 DOF joints and a solid-state battery.

U.S. researchers developed muscle-like elasto‑electromagnetic actuators for insect‑sized soft robots, overcoming the limitations of miniaturized motors.

Chinese scientists developed GEAIR, an autonomous robot that performs genome editing and precision cross-pollination to breed new crop varieties faster.

Wang He, founder of Beijing Galbot, told the 2025 World Robot Conference that the market for humanoids could hit 100B yuan ($14B) within the next decade.

A lifelike AI-powered Tibetan antelope robot is now patrolling the high-altitude wilderness of Hoh Xil in Qinghai, China, collecting real-time data on wild antelopes.

HistoSonics, makers of robotic medical devices, announced that a management-led syndicate of private and public investors acquired its majority stake in a $2.25B deal.

Chinese robotics firm AgiBot signed a major agreement with an automotive parts maker to deploy nearly 100 A2‑W robots across the company’s factories.

Waldog, an AI-powered robotic dog, is roaming the streets of Monterrey, Mexico, to promote animal welfare and raise awareness about animal abuse, Reuters reports.

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Rowan, Jennifer, and Joey—The Rundown’s editorial team