Facebook is enabling a new generation of touchy-feely robots

Without a sense of touch, Frankenstein's monster would never have realized that " fire bad" and we would have had an unstoppable reanimated killing machine on our hands. So be thankful for the most underappreciated of your five senses, one that robots may soon themselves enjoy. Facebook announced on Monday that it has developed a suite of tactile technologies that will impart a sense of touch into robots that the mad doctor could never imagine. But why is Facebook even bothering to look into robotics research at all? "Before I joined Facebook, I was chatting with Mark Zuckerberg, and I asked him, 'Is there any area related to AI that you think we shouldn't be working on?' Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist recalled during a recent press call. "And he said, 'I can't find any good reason for us to work on robotics,' so that was the start of our FAIR [Facebook AI Research] research, that we're not going to work on robotics." "Then, after a few years," he continued, "it became clear that a lot of interesting progress in AI work is happening in the context of robotics because this is the nexus of where people in AI research are trying to get to; the full loop of perception, reasoning, planning and action, and then getting feedback from the from the environment." As such, FAIR has centered its tactile technology research on four main areas of study -- hardware, simulation, processing and perception. We've already seen FAIR's hardware efforts: the DIGIT, a " low-cost, compact high-resolution tactile sensor" that Facebook first announced in 2020. Unlike conventional tactile sensors, which typically rely on capacitive or resistive methods, DIGIT is actually vision-based. "Inside the sensors there is a camera, there are RGB LEDs placed around the silicon, and then there is a silicon gel," Facebook AI Research Scientist, Roberto Calandra, explained. "Whenever we touch the silicone on an object, this is going to create shadows or changes in color cues that are then recorded by the collar.