Robot Arms Learn to Feel, Opening Doors to Precision Handling Tasks

Eka Robotics, led by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja, has developed a system that treats force feedback—the robot's sense of touch and pressure—as equally important to vision. The approach lets robot arms handle delicate work like screwing light bulbs without task-specific programming, adapting to variable conditions on the fly.