A former engineer at the humanoid robotics firm Figure AI has sued the company, alleging they were fired for raising a critical safety issue, CNBC reports.
The principal robotic safety engineer, Robert Gruendel, had warned top executives in September — including CEO Brett Adcock and chief engineer Kyle Edelberg — that the robots “were powerful enough to fracture a human skull,” according to the suit, which was filed Friday in a federal court in California.
It sounds like he had compelling evidence. In a harrowing close call, one robot narrowly missed striking an employee when it suddenly malfunctioned and punched a refrigerator, leaving a “¼-inch deep gash” in the appliance’s “stainless-steel door,” the suit claims.
Days after raising these issues with Adcock and Edelberg, Gruendel was fired.
The lawsuit comes as Figure continues to cement its place as a leader in the humanoid robotics industry, which is currently riding high on a lot of yet-to-be fulfilled potential. Morgan Stanley estimated that androids could be a $5 trillion market by 2050, and it’s this enthusiasm that fueled Figure’s $39 billion valuation during a funding round in September, with major investments coming from Parkway Venture Capital and ever-present AI financier Nvidia.
Long before the firing, Gruendel alleges that he was slowly iced out by Adcock, who took less and less frequent meetings with him; weekly safety meetings became bi-weekly, then monthly, then quarterly. On several occasions, Gruendel says messages he sent to Adcock about safety issues went unanswered.
Edelberg, meanwhile, had gutted an “unchangeable” safety roadmap that Gruendel had shown to investors this summer, even though the product’s safety plan contributed to their decision to invest, the suit argued.
After this setback, Gruendel conducted impact testing with the company’s Figure 02 (F.02) robot, its second latest model which has already seen action in real industrial settings. This month, Figure announced that its F.02 bots had completed an 11 month long deployment at a BMW plant in the US, where it worked on an assembly line and supposedly contributed to the production of over 30,000 cars.
Gruendel claims that the robots could be inflicting serious injuries. During the tests, the bot moved at “super-human speed,” creating impacts that were measured to be “twenty times higher than the threshold of pain.” Gruendel also estimated that the force F.02 generated “to be approximately more than twice the force necessary to fracture an adult human skull.”
He also claims he wasn’t the only employee worried about these risks. After creating a survey where workers could anonymously report safety issues, injuries, and near-misses with the robots, some employees had instead “begun expressing their safety concerns directly” to Gruendel.
But these, evidently, weren’t taken seriously by higher ups, according to the suit. In one particularly telling episode in August, Gruendel discovered that a safety feature of F.02 was removed because the principal engineer, Edelberg, “did not like the aesthetic appearance” of it.
Those on the cutting edge of autonomous machinery can often play fast and loose with safety in the name of progress — just look at the rapid deployment of robotaxis and self-driving cars, despite the technology being far from perfect. But humanoid robots come with unique risks since they are designed to work alongside humans in industrial settings, or even live alongside them in the home.
“This case involves important and emerging issues, and may be among the first whistleblower cases related to the safety of humanoid robots,” Robert Ottinger, Gruendel’s attorney, told CNBC. “Mr. Gruendel looks forward to the judicial process exposing the clear danger this rush to market approach presents to the public.”
Figure has denied the allegations. In an email to CNBC, a spokesperson said Gruendel was “terminated for poor performance,” and that his “allegations are falsehoods that Figure will thoroughly discredit in court.”
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