Humanoid robot fleet decommissioned by AI company by teaching it to take Terminator-style jump into molten steel

A humanoid robot fleet has just been given one of the most dramatic send-offs imaginable after being trained to leap into molten steel.

The robots belonged to Figure AI, which decided its older F.02 machines had reached the end of the road as its newer F.03 fleet continues to grow.

Rather than simply taking the robots apart, the company sent them to a Finnish steel foundry for a very Terminator-style finale.

And yes, the real Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, made an appearance.

The robots were ready for retirement

Figure said the F.02 had been an important part of the company’s development, marking milestones including its first deployment at BMW, the introduction of its Helix system, futuristic household robot demonstrations, and its first logistics deployment.

But now they must die.

With the F.03 fleet growing, maintaining the older humanoid robots no longer made sense, and there was another problem too.

The F.02 robots contained custom-built actuators, proprietary hardware and other intellectual property that Figure didn’t want to risk exposing.

Taking apart the entire fleet manually would also have required engineers to spend valuable time on the old machines instead of working on the company’s upcoming F.04.

So Figure needed a way to get rid of the robots while destroying the hardware inside them.

CEO Brett Adcock asked the internet for suggestions, and one response came from a rather familiar face.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose T-800 famously ended up in a vat of molten steel in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, suggested that Figure should simply melt the robots, and the company took him up on the idea and invited him to do the deed.

Figure actually trained the humanoid robot to jump into molten steel

Finding somewhere willing to put a humanoid robot containing lithium-ion batteries into a furnace was surprisingly difficult.

Figure said foundries it contacted in the US and Mexico turned down the idea, while the company even reached out to former MythBusters members for help.

Eventually, Figure found a foundry in Imatra, Finland, willing to take on the bizarre job, but the robots couldn’t simply be pushed into the furnace.

Engineers first trained the F.02 machines to jump from the second floor of Figure’s campus in San Jose, using large airbags to safely catch them.

Stunt performers provided movement references, while Figure trained a new AI model in simulation to make the robots accurately land in the furnace despite having never seen the Finnish facility before.

The foundry’s electric arc furnace uses three huge graphite electrodes and can hold 75 tons of molten material.

Figure had just 24 hours and six opportunities to get the whole thing right, with each melting cycle offering only around a 20-minute window before the molten steel began developing a hard crust.

The footage was not AI-generated

The resulting footage looks almost too perfect to be real, particularly given the robots’ very obvious Terminator-style farewell.

But Figure stressed that the video wasn’t generated using AI.

The robots were physically shipped from California to Finland, where they autonomously followed the AI policies they had been trained on and leaped into the furnace or were lowered in on a chain by a mysterious cloaked figure – Mr Terminator himself, muttering ‘Hasta la Vista, Figure 2’.

Chills-literal chills.

The extreme environment created its own challenges, with Figure saying some cameras and other electronic equipment failed because of the heat and electromagnetic fields around the furnace.

The F.02 machines were ultimately melted down, but their story doesn’t completely end there.

Figure shipped the resulting metal bars back to the US and plans to turn some of the material into a limited series of commemorative F.02 artifacts.

Most of the F.02 fleet is now gone, although a small number of robots remain in storage at Figure’s headquarters.

It’s certainly one way to say goodbye.

And unlike the Terminator, these robots won’t be back.