Facebook's AI division FAIR is now reportedly experimenting with robotics

Facebook has been dabbling with AI for some time now and we see its applications being used in its News Feed and other products such as Messenger and Instagram. Now it appears that the company is trying its hand at robotics.

As per a report by Bloomberg , the social media giant has published three papers which detail on how it would be using robotics. The first paper involves building a six-legged robot which would then teach itself how to walk through a system of trial and error. The second paper is about making use of “curiosity” to help robots learn faster and the third is the use of the sense of touch which would help a robot achieve simple tasks.

Facebook’s AI research lab known as FAIR is pursuing this line of work in robotics technology. The company’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, told Bloomberg in an interview that “FAIR has a duty to see around corners and be prepared for future products and services, including robots.”

The FAIR engineers are working alongside computer scientists from New York University. The report states that with the combined help, researchers were able to reduce the number of tries to grab an object from thousands or hundreds of tries to tens of tries.

“The great thing about robotics is that it takes place in real time, in the real world,” Antoine Bordes, co-managing director of the company’s artificial intelligence research labs, said in an interview with Bloomberg last week in Paris.