DAIMON Robotics Wants to Give Robot Hands a Sense of Touch

["DAIMON Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company, has released Daimon-Infinity, the world's largest omni-modal robotic dataset for physical AI. This dataset features high-resolution tactile sensing and spans a wide range of tasks, from folding laundry at home to manufacturing on factory assembly lines. The project is supported by partners across China and the globe, including Google DeepMind, Northwestern University, and the National University of Singapore.", "The move signals a key strategic initiative for DAIMON, a two-and-a-half-year-old company known for its advanced tactile sensor hardware.

DAIMON's monochromatic, vision-based tactile sensor packs over 110,000 effective sensing units into a fingertip-sized module. The company's technology captures high-quality, multimodal tactile data, including deformation, slip and friction, material properties, and surface textures.", "Prof. Michael Yu Wang, co-founder and chief scientist at DAIMON Robotics, has pioneered the Vision-Tactile-Language-Action (VTLA) architecture, elevating tactile sensing to a modality on par with vision.

The VTLA model aims to address the missing 'insensitivity' of robot manipulation, which practically relies on the dominant Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. By incorporating tactile sensing, robots can better understand their environment and interact with objects.", "DAIMON Robotics has also open-sourced 10,000 hours of its dataset to accelerate the advancement of the entire embodied AI field. The company's business strategy is focused on '3D': Devices, Data, and Deployment.

They build devices for data collection, their own ecosystem, and for deploying them in partners' potential application domains. This enables the collection of real-world tactile-rich data and complete closed-loop validation.", "The company's vision is for robots to achieve robust manipulation capabilities and evolve into reliable partners for humans. They aim to enable robots to operate in unstructured environments, make decisions, and take actions autonomously.

With the growing realization of the necessity of tactile data, DAIMON's technology is poised to elevate the entire community and industry to a higher level."]