Figure did not buy its fingertip sensors. When it introduced Figure 03 on October 9, 2025, the company said that after surveying the market it found current tactile sensors “had inherent limitations that could not withstand real-world use.” So it developed its own first-generation sensor, built around three stated priorities: durability, long-term reliability and high-fidelity sensing.

What the hardware does

Figure says each fingertip sensor can detect forces as small as three grams, about the weight of a paperclip resting on a finger. Figure describes the fingertips as softer and more adaptive, which it says increases contact area and makes grasps more stable. Each hand has a palm camera as well, so the robot can still see what it is holding when its head cameras are blocked, for example while reaching into a cabinet.

Figure’s stated aim is for its Helix model to “distinguish between a secure grip and an impending slip before it occurs.” For commercial work, it points to better grasps on small pieces of sheet metal and deformable poly bags.

What Helix does with it

The hardware came first. The software followed in January 2026 with Helix 02. Figure says the model’s fast control layer now takes head cameras, palm cameras, fingertip tactile sensors and full-body joint data as inputs, and that this was “the first time we’ve demonstrated neural network policies that depend on these modalities.”

It showed four tasks: unscrewing a bottle cap with controlled grip force, extracting a single pill from a medicine organizer, pushing exactly 5 ml from a syringe against variable resistance, and picking small metal parts from a cluttered box of pieces from Figure’s BotQ manufacturing facility.

What is missing

Neither post gives success rates for these tasks or shows them with the tactile input switched off. That comparison is the one that would show how much touch adds over the palm cameras alone. Neither post reports how the sensors have held up over months of use, which was the reason Figure gave for building its own.

Whether Figure publishes reliability or wear data for the fingertips, and whether touch-dependent tasks like these appear in its commercial deployments rather than lab demonstrations.