Robots Are Learning to Feel

Dexterous manipulation remains one of the biggest barriers keeping robots from successfully tackling a wide range of everyday tasks. A sense of touch could be the key, but a lack of quality data has held back progress. This is now starting to change as academic labs and startups race to build new tactile datasets and techniques to put them to use.Over the last few years, vision-language-action (VLA) models have significantly improved the ability of robots to carry out complex tasks involving obj