Earlier this year, when Figure CEO Brett Adcock referred to 2024 as the year of embodied AI, few could predict the extraordinary advancements in robotics, pushing the boundaries of what once seemed implausible.
Last week, an unexpected contender released research updates that advance robotics to a new level. Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) released three new research artefacts that advance touch perception, robot dexterity and human-robot interaction, namely Meta Sparsh, Meta Digit 360, and Meta Digit Plexus.
Source: Meta
Meta Sparsh, derived from the Sanskrit word for ‘touch’, is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing. The technology aims to integrate robots with the sense of touch, thereby addressing a crucial modality to interact with the world.
Sparsh operates across various types of vision-based tactile sensors and tasks that use self-supervised learning, eliminating the need for labelled data. It consists of a family of models pre-trained on an extensive dataset of over 4,60,000 tactile images.
Meta has also released Meta Digit 360, a tactile …