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What’s next for Meta? The social media giant’s interests have swayed wildly over the past few years. Phones, crypto, tablets, metaverse, smart glasses, and finally, AI. The next avenue for Meta is apparently humanoid robots.
According to Bloomberg, the company is pouring resources into the development of AI-powered humanoid robots. “Meta plans to work on its own humanoid robot hardware, with an initial focus on household chores,” says the report.
The pivot is not surprising. In 2021, the company gave a glimpse of its DIGIT tech for robotic fingers. It relies on a vision-based tactile sensor to identify the objects it is gripping and simulate what us humans refer to as “touch.”
The company also partnered with Carnegie Mellon researchers to develop a low-cost, replaceable touch-sensing skin for robots called ReSkin. The elastomer-based surface mimics the human skin for accurately applying pressure levels.
Unlike Elon Musk and his Optimus robot, which are still firmly rooted in the vaporware territory, Meta is not merely planning to hawk robots that handle household chores.
Meta chief, Mark Zuckerberg, is apparently eying a firm position in the industrial supply chain itself. To that end, the company is building the whole stack so that it can sell the underlying tech — or parts of it — to interested companies.
The social media titan hopes to sell the foundation elements of a humanoid robot, to put it in simpler terms. That includes the underlying software for making sense of the world around it (aka computer vision), the sensor assembly, and computing modules.
Meta is reportedly seeing the humanoid robot project as an avenue for integrating the work it has already done with AI, augmented and mixed reality (AR and MR), as well as hardware sensing. Unsurprisingly, Meta hopes to push its Llama AI models as an apt platform for robotics, as well.
The biggest difference compared to the likes of Boston Dynamics is that Meta wants to make humanoid robots that will assist with at-home tasks, instead of getting deployed into workhouses and factories.
Now, I am not sure how many people would be psyched about the idea, especially with the company’s not-so-stellar track record with user privacy. And it seems Meta knows the risks, as well.
“At least initially, it doesn’t plan to build a Meta-branded robot — something that could directly rival Tesla Inc.’s Optimus — but it may consider doing so in the future,” adds the report.
Meta has reportedly hired the chief of General Motors’ self-driving tech division to lead its robotics effort. The company is also said to be in talks with Unitree Robotics and Figure AI to begin its work.
The humanoid robot project will reportedly fall under the aegis of Meta’s Reality Labs division, which is already busy developing the holographic Orion smart glasses, mixed reality software ecosystem, and a bunch of sensor tracking hardware, too.
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