At the end of Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 gives Sarah Connor a thumbs-up and slowly sinks into molten steel. On September 30, Figure AI brought that scene to life: its second-generation humanoid robot, F.02, took off autonomously at a foundry in Finland, leaping into molten steel one after another, and one even recreated that thumbs-up gesture. In its announcement, Figure specifically clarified that in an era dominated by AI-generated videos, every jump in this video is real: the robots really jumped on their own, were really transported to Finland, and really jumped into a vat of molten steel.
Who is F.02?
Figure’s farewell message to F.02 begins with just one sentence: “We deeply love Figure 02; it is an amazing robot.” That line has a specific backstory. F.02 set several firsts for the company: the first to enter a BMW factory, the birthplace of the Helix model, the first robot that could do household chores, and the first logistics deployment. As the F.03 fleet expands, continuing to maintain F.02 is no longer cost-effective, making retirement a foregone conclusion.
That BMW stint is the strongest line on F.02’s résumé. In November 2025, Figure announced the results of an 11-month deployment at BMW’s Spartanburg plant: the robot worked 10-hour shifts every day, Monday through Friday, with perfect attendance; accumulated more than 1,250 operating hours; loaded over 90,000 sheet metal parts; helped produce more than 30,000 X3 vehicles; and logged over 1.2 million steps and more than 200 miles traveled. The task was sheet metal loading, requiring an 84-second cycle, a 37-second loading segment, a placement success rate above 99% per shift, zero human interventions, and placing parts onto welding fixtures within 2 seconds with 5 mm precision. After 1,250 hours of operation, hardware failures were extremely rare, and the forearm joint with the highest failure rate directly led to the redesign of the F.03 wrist.
F.02 was also where Helix began. Helix is Figure’s humanoid robot AI model, and the first-generation Helix VLA ran on a pair of F.02s, with the two robots collaborating on household chores. Helix 02 further proved that a single neural policy can coordinate a humanoid robot’s whole body and execute tasks over long periods, from unloading the dishwasher to 200 consecutive hours of autonomous logistics. The latest Helix 2.5 tackles zero-shot generalization: a single foundation model pretrained on the Index human behavior dataset produces three whole-body behaviors—tidying the living room, folding towels, and making the bed—and goes straight into 30 previously unseen Bay Area homes to start work, achieving a 56% success rate, while the control group without pretraining achieved only 9%, and it used half as much task-specific data as in the Helix 02 era. When F.02 retired, the model it had incubated could already go into strangers’ homes to do household chores.
Why must it be melted?
The way it was retired was unexpected, but the reason was pragmatic. The F.02 is full of custom actuators and proprietary hardware; disassembling it one unit at a time would mean laying its core technology bare for all to see, and the engineering manpower required would also slow F.04 development. Figure simply went online to ask everyone how to handle it, and the most popular reply came from an unexpected person: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told Figure Melt them down.As a result, Figure approached Arno, who immediately agreed to participate, and the whole thing was set in motion.
The search for a furnace was harder than expected. As soon as foundries in the US and Mexico heard there was a lithium-ion battery in the robot’s belly, none were willing to let it jump into their expensive equipment. Figure even brought in former MythBusters crew to help with the search, and in the end only one foundry in Imatra, Finland, said yes.
First, practice jumping on the second floor of headquarters.
The robot has to jump in on its own, and the jump itself became a new challenge. The team set up a large air cushion at its San Jose headquarters and had F.02 jump down from the second floor of a building, using a stunt performer’s movements as a template to train an entirely new motion model in simulation. The hard part is that the robot has to nail the jump on the first try in a foundry it has never visited, landing in the furnace vessel, with no chance to rehearse. Figure CEO Brett Adcock also posted some of the training videos on X.
The showdown site was a 75-ton electric arc furnace, where three massive graphite electrodes melted scrap steel. The team had only 24 hours and 6 chances to melt, with only about a 20-minute window per melt; once the molten steel cooled and formed a skin, all would be for nothing. The heat and electromagnetic fields on site were so intense that cameras and other electronic equipment failed one after another, but F.02 kept running its own motion strategy, completely unaffected by the electronic interference.
Arnold himself also acted in a segment: in the video, one F.02 is slowly lowered into the furnace suspended by chains, recreating the ending in which T-800 is put into molten steel by Sarah Connor at the steel mill—right down to the shot of him leaning against the molten steel and giving a thumbs-up. The other F.02s jump on their own, and one even does a flip in midair.
The successor F.03 has already entered mass production.
The flip side of F.02’s exit is F.03’s successful production ramp. In April, Figure announced the results of its BotQ mass-production plant: in under 120 days, production speed went from one unit per day to one unit per hour, a 24-fold increase, and more than 350 F.03 units have been delivered. The line is backed by manufacturing execution software for more than 150 connected workstations, more than 50 in-process inspection points, a first-pass yield of over 80% for complete units, 99.3% first-pass yield on the battery line, more than 500 battery packs shipped, and more than 9,000 actuators produced across more than 10 part numbers. Before each robot leaves the factory, it must pass more than 80 functional validations, plus a full-body burn-in of thousands of squats, shoulder presses, and jogs.
Fleet size feeds directly into Helix. Robots off the BotQ line are assigned to internal R&D, data collection, and end-to-end household and commercial scenario development. The larger the fleet, the more data streams Helix receives. The latest unlock is Helix System 0’s vision-conditioned whole-body control: S0 previously walked on flat ground using only proprioception; now it uses stereo vision from a head camera, uses reinforcement learning to traverse thousands of randomized terrains in simulation, and transfers the same set of weights zero-shot directly to real hardware to climb stairs, with no on-site fine-tuning.
The melted metal becomes a souvenir.
The smelted metal bars are shipped back to the United States, where Figure is machining them into limited-edition F.02 commemorative items, producing only a small run and condensing a piece of company history into an object you can put on a desk.Official WebsiteThe pre-order price is US$500 for the small size (about NT$16,250) and US$1,900 for the large size (about NT$61,750).
The vast majority of the F.02 fleet is gone, with only a few units mothballed at headquarters. This is the generational handover as F.03 takes over; the old fleet is retiring after a job well done. From BMW production lines, household tasks, and logistics warehouses to one last jump over a Finnish foundry, F.02 capped off its run with a retirement ceremony paying tribute to Terminator 2. F.03 mass production is ramping up, F.04 is on the way, and Figure shows no sign of slowing its generational replacement cadence.
Source: KOCPC Chinese