2025 · Figure AI · Advanced
Figure Helix
Helix is Figure's generalist humanoid VLA model for onboard perception, reasoning, and full-upper-body control.
Direct answer
What does Figure Helix contribute?
Helix is Figure's generalist humanoid VLA model for onboard perception, reasoning, and full-upper-body control.
Background
Figure describes Helix as a unified perception-language-action system that runs on humanoid robots and outputs high-rate continuous control across hands, wrists, torso, and head.
Problem
The work addresses a central constraint in VLA: building systems that learn useful representations or actions while remaining general enough to transfer beyond a single demonstration or environment.
Core idea
Helix is Figure's generalist humanoid VLA model for onboard perception, reasoning, and full-upper-body control.
Architecture and method
Figure describes Helix as a unified perception-language-action system that runs on humanoid robots and outputs high-rate continuous control across hands, wrists, torso, and head.
- Full-upper-body humanoid control
- Onboard VLA-style reasoning and action
- Multi-robot collaboration demonstrations
Results and impact
It is one of the most important non-academic signals that humanoid companies are building their own embodied AI stacks, not only robot hardware.
Prerequisites
- Humanoid robotics
- VLA models
- Dexterous manipulation
Recommended reading order
Read the explanation above, review the related topic pages, then use the primary-source links below to inspect the abstract, figures, experiments, and released implementation.
Primary sources
External links are provided after the context needed to evaluate the work.
Follow-up research
Related papers and concepts
RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
RT-1 trains one transformer policy on a large multi-task dataset of real robot demonstrations.
RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control
RT-2 co-trains vision-language models on web and robot data so semantic knowledge can influence actions.
Open X-Embodiment and RT-X
Open X-Embodiment combines robot datasets across institutions and trains policies that transfer across embodiments.
OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model
OpenVLA is an open 7B-parameter VLA trained on the Open X-Embodiment dataset.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
What is the main idea of Figure Helix?
Helix is Figure's generalist humanoid VLA model for onboard perception, reasoning, and full-upper-body control.
Why is Figure Helix important?
It is one of the most important non-academic signals that humanoid companies are building their own embodied AI stacks, not only robot hardware.
What should I learn before reading Figure Helix?
Recommended prerequisites are Humanoid robotics, VLA models, Dexterous manipulation.