Humanoid robot maker Sanctuary AI secures vital IP to advance touch and grasping capabilities

EMERGING TECH

Robotics company Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corp., which is aiming to build intelligent and humanlike general-purpose robots that can augment human labor, said today it has acquired key intellectual property assets that will prove to be essential in fulfilling its mission.

The company said the patents relate to touch sensitivity and grasping capabilities, which are vital to building robots that can function as humans do. The patents enable superior coordination between touch sensors, which provide tactile feedback to robots, and vision systems, and will pave the way for what Sanctuary AI considers artificial general intelligence. According to the startup, its AGI systems will enable it to build robots that are truly autonomous.

Sanctuary AI claims that its researchers are at the forefront of breakthroughs in AI, cognition, robotics, theoretical physics and quantum computing, and intend to combine these advances to create humanlike robots that can perform almost any kind of manual task. It says it intends for its robots to be directly piloted by human operators, and also work entirely on their own initiative using AGI.

The startup closed on a $58.5 million funding round in May 2022 to help it achieve its goals, and followed up exactly one year later with the launch of its humanoid Phoenix robot, saying it will provide “labor-as-a-service” to interested companies. Phoenix was the first humanoid robot in the world to feature bipedal locomotion, and demonstrated an ability to perform hundreds of different tasks.

The new patents acquired today were purchased from the robotics startup Giant.AI Inc. and Tangible Research, and expand a growing portfolio that already protects a number of key innovations in robotic grasping that were developed by Sanctuary AI’s internal teams. It said its grasping technologies relate to visual serving, real-time simulation of the grasping process, and mapping between visual and haptic data. By using these technologies together, Sanctuary AI said, its robots are uniquely able to interact with and manipulate physical objects in dynamic real-world environments.

By strengthening its patent portfolio, Sanctuary AI says it will be able to accelerate a unique approach to the development of robots that’s focused on combining hand-eye coordination inputs with human-analog hands and arms.

Jeremy Fishel, who founded Tangible Research and is also the principal researcher at Sanctuary AI, said the ability to replicate humanlike touch in robots is even more important than vision when it comes to grasping objects in unstructured environments. “It has been an effort many years in the making to meet the complex blend of performance, features, and durability to achieve general purpose dexterity,” he said.

Photo: Sanctuary AI