Facebook finally revealed what its secretive robotics division is working on, and it could spark new competition with rivals like Google and Apple

Facebook has publicly spoken about its interest in robotics in the past, but on Monday, the company finally shared details regarding the specific projects it's working on. The social media giant unveiled three robotics projects that it hopes will contribute to solving the ongoing challenge of building artificial intelligence systems that don't have to rely on large quantities of labeled data to learn new information. To do so, the company is conducting research aimed at teaching robots how to learn about the world, similar to the way that humans do. "The real world is messy, it's difficult," Roberto Calandra, a research scientist in Facebook's AI division said when speaking to Business Insider. "The world is not a perfect place; it's not neat. So the fact that we are trying to develop algorithms that work on real robots [will] help to create [AI] algorithms that, generally speaking, are going to be more reliable, more robust, and that are going to learn faster."