Nieves streams 2,200 parcels an hour to Figure's 1,200
A rare humanoid versus incumbent comparison with a shared unit, parcels per hour on the same job.
Figure live-streamed a humanoid doing parcel induction at 1,200 units per hour. Erik Nieves set up his own stream to answer it, and Brad Porter wrote up both runs.
Nieves hit 2,200 to 2,400 parcels per hour, bulk flow, full SKU mix. Porter frames that as what entitlement looks like, entitlement being the rate a system is actually signed up to hold on a real workload rather than the rate it shows once on camera. His credential list for Nieves is 35 years deploying industrial robots, more than 200 deployments and two billion picks.
Why the number matters
Humanoid demos almost never come with a figure you can hold up against the incumbent doing the same job. This one does. Parcel induction is a defined task, parcels per hour is a defined unit, and both sides put a stream out. That is why the comparison traveled.
The caution is that Porter's post is the only account here describing both runs, so conditions on either side are not independently documented. A rate from a live demo and a rate from a workload a vendor has committed to are not the same kind of number, which is roughly Porter's point.
The running thread
Nieves streaming against Figure's pick rate earlier already caught attention. What is new is the head to head parcel induction figure and Porter's writeup putting the two rates side by side.
Porter's post also points to a Deployed episode, EP13, which he says is live.
The gap between a demo and an entitled workload is the whole conversation.
2,200 to 2,400. Bulk flow. Full SKU mix.
Nobody in the sources breaks down what Figure's 1,200 run involved, how long either stream lasted, or whether the SKU mixes were comparable. Until someone publishes that, the honest read is one experienced integrator posting a higher number on a job a humanoid company chose to show. The unit is shared. The test conditions are not.