Figure retires its F.02 humanoid fleet by training the robots to jump into molten steel

Figure is winding down F.02

Humanoid robotics company Figure is decommissioning its F.02 robot fleet as the newer F.03 machines scale up. In an announcement published on October 2 that quickly landed on the front page of Hacker News, the company described a retirement plan that sounds like a movie stunt: rather than dismantling the robots, it trained them to autonomously leap into molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland, with Arnold Schwarzenegger involved in the production.

Why the fleet is being retired

According to Figure, F.02 carried several company firsts: the initial deployment at BMW, the origin of Helix, its first robot doing household chores, and its first logistics deployment. With F.03 units now growing in number, the company concluded that keeping the older fleet maintained no longer made sense.

A disposal problem with proprietary parts

The robots are built around custom actuators and other proprietary hardware, so Figure could not simply sell or scrap them. Taking every unit apart by hand would have consumed so much of its technical staff's time that it would have pushed back the launch of F.04, the company said. Figure instead asked the public what to do, and Schwarzenegger's answer was to melt them — advice straight out of Terminator 2. When Figure reached out, he wanted to be part of it.

Finding a furnace willing to take the job

Securing a foundry proved harder than expected. Figure says every metal foundry it contacted in the US and Mexico refused, unwilling to let robots carrying lithium-ion batteries anywhere near their expensive equipment. The company even brought in the former MythBusters team to help the search. The only operation anywhere willing to take the job was a foundry in Imatra, Finland.

Training the jump

Preparation took place at Figure's San Jose campus, where the team set up large airbags and taught the robots to jump from the second floor of one of its buildings. Using movements from stunt artists as reference, the team trained a new AI model in simulation so the robots could land accurately in a vessel of molten steel at a facility no one from the company had visited.

At the foundry, three graphite electrodes power a 75-ton electric arc furnace that melts solid steel scrap. Figure's team had 24 hours and six melt cycles to work with, and each cycle offered only a 20-minute window before the molten steel cooled and formed a hard crust. Despite the extreme heat and electromagnetic fields, which knocked out camera equipment and other electronics, the robots ran their learned policies without disruption, the company says.

From scrap steel to collectibles

After the melt, Figure shipped the resulting metal bars back to the US, where the material is now being machined into a limited series of artifacts commemorating F.02 that the company is selling. Most of the fleet is gone, with only a few units left in storage at headquarters. Figure also went out of its way to stress that the footage is genuine — the robots really were trained to jump on their own, shipped to Finland, and plunged into molten steel — a meaningful clarification at a time when AI-generated video makes such claims difficult to take at face value.

Why it matters

Fleet retirements are routine in any hardware business, but this one is worth a second look for three reasons. First, it is a lifecycle signal: F.02 is finished, F.03 is scaling, and F.04 development is far enough along that engineering hours are a resource Figure actively protects. Second, the stunt doubles as a demonstration of sim-to-real robustness — a control policy trained entirely in simulation, guided by stunt-performer reference motion, executed reliably in an environment whose heat and electromagnetic interference destroyed other electronics on site. Third, it shows how robotics companies increasingly package hardware milestones as entertainment and merchandise, converting an intellectual-property disposal obligation into a marketing event complete with a Hollywood cameo and a limited-edition product run.