Robot Arms Finally Master Delicate Tasks by Treating Touch as a Primary Sense

Eka Robotics, co-founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, has built a Vision-Force-Action model that prioritizes force feedback alongside vision for robot manipulation. The architecture enables tasks like screwing light bulbs—feats most commercial robot arms cannot perform. The force-first approach allows robots to adapt to delicate, variable work without task-specific programming.