General-purpose Robot

A robot not built for one fixed task, meant to handle many tasks across many settings.

A general-purpose robot is defined in contrast to a special-purpose one. A traditional industrial robot is programmed for one production line and one operation, and needs reprogramming and new tooling whenever the task changes. A general-purpose robot aims to be more like a person: one body plus one intelligent system that can do many things, including handling objects and environments it has never seen before. On the hardware side, this usually means a humanoid or a dual-arm mobile platform, since doors, tools, and stairs are all designed for the human body — companies such as Figure cite this as their reason for building humanoids. On the software side, it relies on generalist policies or embodied foundation models that learn cross-task ability from large-scale data; Physical Intelligence's π0, for example, is trained on data from single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile-manipulation robots, and can fold laundry, clear a table, and assemble a box. Every product today still falls short of this goal — it remains a long-term direction for embodied AI.

ExampleIn its company plan (Master Plan), dated May 2022, Figure set out to build a “general-purpose humanoid robot”: one humanoid hardware platform taking on a large share of the work people currently do, instead of building a separate special-purpose robot for every task.

Also called

Generalist Robot

Related

Embodied AI · Generalist Policy · Humanoid Robot · Industrial Robot · Embodied Foundation Model · π0

Sources

Figure AI: Master Plan
π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control

As of

2024-10