Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Meta made several major announcements for robotics and embodied AI systems this week. This includes releasing benchmarks and artifacts for better understanding and interacting with the physical world. Sparsh, Digit 360 and Digit Plexus, the three research artifacts released by Meta, focus on touch perception, robot dexterity and human-robot interaction. Meta is also releasing PARTNR a new benchmark for evaluating planning and reasoning in human-robot collaboration. The release comes as advances in foundational models have renewed interest in robotics, and AI companies are gradually expanding their race from the digital realm to the physical world. There is renewed hope in the industry that with the help of foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), robots can accomplish more complex tasks that require reasoning and planning. Tactile perception Sparsh, which was created in collaboration with the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, is a family of encoder models for vision-based tactile …