Facebook is quietly developing 'soft robotics' — flexible robots that move and act like living organisms
Using next-generation materials and experimental designs, today's soft-robotics projects can resemble worms and cephalopods, bending and flexing to perform tasks rigid robots can't handle and adapting to real-world environments.
It's not clear what Facebook's soft-robotics researchers have been working on, and a company spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
There are currently three open postings at Facebook to work on soft robotics in Redmond, Washington, according to job listings seen by Business Insider.
Facebook's interest in the field has not been previously reported, but it has been quietly hiring researchers in the field for more than a year, social-media posts show. The far-out tech has no clear commercial application in any of the consumer-hardware products Facebook currently builds, from its Oculus virtual-reality headsets to the Portal video-chat device — so why is the company investing in it?
Facebook's chief artificial-intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, has previously said that the company is broadly investing in robotics because potential learnings from the field may be transferrable to its work in AI.
But the listings make clear these roles aren't just working on theory or simulation — they're actually building the physical robotics tech.
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