The Dishwasher Wars: Figure Fires Back at Sunday Robotics with Glassware Demo

The battle for domestic supremacy has moved from the laboratory to the kitchen sink. A day after Figure unveiled Helix 02, its next-generation AI system for whole-body autonomy, the company has found itself in a high-stakes "dishwasher war" with competitor Sunday Robotics.

The "Plasticware" Critique

The conflict began when Sunday Robotics CEO Tony Zhao publicly scrutinized Figure’s initial four-minute demonstration of a Figure 03 robot autonomously loading a dishwasher. Zhao, whose company recently unveiled the wheeled "Memo" robot, noted that all objects in Figure’s footage appeared to be plastic.

"Nitpick from a roboticist: it looks like all objects this time are plastic, and some of the manipulations seem to rely on that," Zhao commented, highlighting a common skepticism in the industry regarding the gap between durable plasticware and the "messy reality" of fragile ceramics and glassware. Sunday Robotics has built its brand on high-fidelity dexterity, specifically demonstrating Memo's ability to handle delicate wine glasses using its custom dual-gripper and "Skill Capture Glove" data.

Adcock Responds with Glass

Today, Figure CEO Brett Adcock issued a direct—and characteristically blunt—rebuttal. Adcock posted a new video of the Figure 03 robot loading a dishwasher, but this time the racks were filled with obvious glassware, including the very item Zhao had championed: a delicate wine glass.

"oh no glassware lol," Adcock tweeted, adding the confirmation that the task was, "as always fully autonomous, running Helix 02."

The new footage aims to prove that the Helix 02 architecture is not limited to durable materials. The system utilizes a "System 1" visuomotor policy operating at 200 Hz to translate vision and tactile data directly into joint targets. This "pixels-to-torque" approach is designed to handle the delicate force control required for fragile items without the "stop-and-go" workflow of older bipedal systems.

High-Stakes Rivalry

The exchange is the latest in a series of public confrontations involving Adcock, who has a history of aggressive social media interactions with industry rivals. In a follow-up today, he re-tweeted a fan's response that said "Brett when he sees your dumb comments," accompanied by a GIF of a bazooka blowing up a car.

This combative style is well-documented; Adcock has previously predicted the bankruptcy of Agility Robotics and dismissed the teleoperation strategies of competitors like 1X as "soy stuff".

While Sunday Robotics argues that the industry is still trapped between a "GPT" and "ChatGPT" moment, Figure’s latest retort suggests they believe they have already crossed the threshold into practical, zero-shot domestic utility. Whether the Figure 03 can maintain this level of precision in "unseen" homes remains the ultimate test for the Helix 02 system.