Meta says it’s partnering with sensor firm GelSight and Wonik Robotics, a South Korean robotics company, to commercialize tactile sensors for AI.
GelSight will work with Meta to bring to market Digit 360, which Meta describes as a “a tactile fingertip with human-level multimodal sensing capabilities.” The successor to Meta’s Digit sensor, Digit 360 digitizes touch signals, using an on-device AI chip and roughly 18 “sensing features” to detect changes in its surroundings.
“We developed a touch-perception-specific optical system with a wide field of view … for capturing omnidirectional deformations on the fingertip surface,” Meta explained in a blog post. “Additionally, we equipped the sensor with many sensing modalities, since each touch interaction with the environment has a unique profile produced by the mechanical, geometrical, and chemical properties of a surface to perceive vibrations, sense heat, and even smell odor.”
Digit 360 will be available for purchase next year, and Meta’s launched a call for proposals through which researchers can gain early access.
Meta’s work with Wonik will focus on a new generation of Wonik’s Allegro Hand, a robotic hand with tactile sensors like Digit 360. Building on a platform Meta developed to integrate sensors on a single robot hand, the upcoming Allegro Hand will feature control boards that encode data from the tactile sensors onto a host computer.
“Allegro Hand is poised to help advance robotics research by making it easier for researchers to conduct experiments,” Meta wrote. “By leveraging such multimodal signals, [these devices] will help scientists advance research into AI that can learn about the world in richer detail. Over time, we hope researchers will use [them] to develop AI that can better understand and model the physical world, including the physicality of objects, human-object interaction, and contact physics.”
The Allegro Hand will be available starting next year.