Hasta La Vista, F.02: Figure Melted Its Robot Fleet on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Advice
This is the best robotics story of the year, and it’s not close.
Humanoid robotics company Figure just retired its entire F.02 robot fleet in the most dramatic way imaginable: by training the robots to autonomously jump into a 75-tonne electric arc furnace filled with molten steel.
And the idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
How We Got Here
Figure is moving from its second-generation F.02 humanoid to the newer F.03. Keeping the old fleet running no longer made financial sense — but simply dismantling them would have consumed precious engineering time and risked exposing custom actuators and proprietary hardware.
So founder and CEO Brett Adcock did what any modern CEO does: he asked the internet for ideas for a proper send-off.
Arnold Schwarzenegger replied. His suggestion? Melt them — a nod to Terminator 2, where his own character famously descends into molten metal at the film’s climax.
Figure said yes. Of course they did.
Finding a Furnace Willing to Melt Robots
This part is my favorite. It turns out you can’t just walk into any foundry with a truck full of humanoid robots.
Facilities Figure approached in the US and Mexico refused — nobody wanted lithium-ion batteries going into their furnaces. Fair enough. Eventually, the company found a willing partner in Imatra, Finland, home to an electric arc furnace with three graphite electrodes and a 75-tonne capacity.
Figure was allocated 24 hours and six melts, with a window of about 20 minutes per melt before the molten steel began developing a solid crust. No pressure.
Teaching Robots Their Final Jump
Here’s where it becomes a genuine engineering story, not just a stunt.
Before shipping the F.02 fleet to Finland, Figure set up airbags at its San Jose campus and trained the robots to jump from a second-floor height. Movements captured from stunt performers were used as references to train an AI model in simulation — with the goal of enabling each robot to jump accurately into the furnace without ever having seen the site.
Think about that: sim-to-real transfer, for a final jump, into a target the robot had never encountered. And it worked.
Even more remarkable: the F.02 robots kept running their AI policies despite the extreme heat and powerful electromagnetic fields around the furnace — conditions so harsh they knocked out some of the camera and electronic equipment the film crew was using. The robots outperformed the cameras filming them.
What the F.02 Fleet Accomplished
Before we pour one out, let’s remember what these machines did. The F.02 was Figure’s first robot deployed at BMW, and the platform used to develop the company’s Helix AI system.
During an 11-month deployment at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, F.02 robots loaded more than 90,000 parts over 1,250 operating hours, contributing to the production of over 30,000 vehicles.
That’s not a demo. That’s a production résumé most industrial robots never achieve.
Figure has since returned to the BMW plant with the F.03, and an F.04 generation is already in development. A small number of F.02 units remain in storage — the survivors.
From Robots to Relics
The steel recovered from the Finnish furnace was shipped back to the US, where it’s being machined into a limited number of commemorative objects — artifacts literally forged from melted robots.
I don’t know what those objects are, but “paperweight made from a humanoid robot that loaded 90,000 BMW parts” is the most cyberpunk desk accessory ever conceived.
Why This Actually Matters
Strip away the spectacle, and this story tells you three important things about where humanoid robotics stands in 2026:
- Fleets are real now. You don’t melt a “fleet” unless you have enough robots that retiring them is a logistics problem. Figure had so many F.02s that keeping them running was a line item someone wanted to delete.
- Sim-to-real works. Training a jump in simulation from stunt-performer motion capture, then executing it perfectly at an unseen foundry in Finland — that’s the kind of generalization the whole industry is chasing.
- The marketing is the message. Let’s be honest: Figure could have quietly recycled these robots. Instead, they turned decommissioning into a viral engineering film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s idea. In a funding environment where attention is currency, that’s not frivolous — it’s strategy.
The Bottom Line
A robot that spent 11 months building BMWs just took its final bow — a running jump into 1,600°C of molten steel, in Finland, on camera, because the Terminator suggested it.
The F.02 fleet is gone. Long live the F.03.
And somewhere in California, there’s a commemorative object made from melted humanoid that I desperately want on my desk.
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