META CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that the company has designed a new synthetic skin for robots that could enable the machines to help build the company’s metaverse.

A collaborated project with Carnegie Mellon University, ReSkin lets robots “feel” objects to know how much or little force should be used to perform tasks, such as gripping or moving small objects. The skin is up to three millimeters thick and can be used for more than 50,000 interactions, while also having a high temporal resolution of up to 400Hz and a spatial resolution of one millimeter with 90 percent accuracy.

ReSkin is also inexpensive to produce, costing less than US$6 each at 100 units and even less at larger quantities, Facebook AI shared in a blog post.

According to Abhinav Gupta, a research scientist at Meta, robots that can feel will help the machines understand what humans are doing. “We can for the first time try to have better understanding of the physics behind objects,” Gupta said, adding it will help the company’s vision to build a metaverse.

The company’s metaverse aims to let people enter a virtual world where they can be anybody or do anything, all from the comfort of their own home. However, the company needs to first build the fictional realm and is looking to robots for help.

Facebook AI showed its ReSkin in action in a video that included two robotic hands: one with the synthetic skin and the other without. Both arms were programmed to grab a blueberry on a table. The one fitted with ReSkin gently grabbed the blueberry and only squeezed until it felt the fruit was secure inside its two robotic fingers. The other machine without the skin closed its fingers to collect the blueberry and kept pulling them together until the berries were squished.

“ReSkin offers useful tactile-sensing features for in-hand manipulation, such as for designing AI for training robots to use a key to unlock a door or to grasp delicate objects, like grapes or blueberries,” Facebook AI shared in the post.

(SD-Agencies)