Fully Autonomous

The robot carries out a task under its own model's control the whole way through, with no person operating it from behind the scenes.

This term is the counterpart to teleoperation, in which a person wearing a VR headset or holding a leader arm controls the robot in real time; “fully autonomous” means the policy model — a network that maps observations to actions — decides every step on its own. When releasing a demo, companies often label the footage “Autonomous” to signal that no one is operating it, sometimes alongside a “1x speed” label to show it hasn't been sped up. Note that “fully autonomous” only tells you no one was remote-controlling it during execution — it doesn't mean the results weren't cherry-picked, that the scene wasn't staged in advance, or that the task was something the model had never seen before; it's also worth checking whether the whole run was autonomous or whether a person stepped in partway through (see intervention rate).

ExampleWhen Figure released Helix 02 in January 2026, it noted that the demo videos on the page were “all fully autonomous, not teleoperated,” and said the robot loaded and unloaded a dishwasher throughout an entire kitchen in a 4-minute task with no resets and no human intervention.

Also called

Autonomous Label, Non-teleoperated

Related

Teleoperated Demo · Demo (Demonstration Video) · Playback Speed Label · Remote Teleoperation Takeover · Intervention Rate · Levels of Autonomy

Sources

Introducing Helix 02: Full-Body Autonomy (Figure, 2026-01-27)

As of

2026-01