Figure Helix 02 gains whole-body autonomy

Figure is pitching Helix 02 as a systems breakthrough, not a one-off chore demo: one learned stack for balance, movement, and manipulation. That is the right ambition for humanoids, because stitched-together controllers still break down when tasks get longer and messier.

• –The real milestone is the move from upper-body-only Helix to continuous whole-body loco-manipulation across a room.
• –Replacing hand-engineered control code with learned priors from human motion data is a bold bet on scaling data over classical robotics pipelines.
• –Tactile fingertips and palm cameras matter as much as the model upgrade, because fine manipulation is where humanoid demos usually hit the wall.