Meta’s Metabot is a humanoid robot that the company wants to be the backbone of robotics’ future

Meta is making another “AR size bet” and plans to invest billions of dollars in building humanoid robots. While the company is working on a “Metabot”, its goal is bigger than just making hardware.

The software backbone for humanoid robots is Meta’s next big goal

Meta has started what it calls a “research effort” in robotics earlier this year, and despite building a humanoid robot, that’s not its main goal. The company’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, said in an interview with Sources’ Alex Heath that his vision is for a software platform that could be licensed to other companies that manufacture the hardware. 

That idea would function similarly to how Google provides Android to smartphone manufacturers. Meta wants to develop a software blueprint that any company that builds a robot with certain specs could use. Bosworth says that software is the bigger challenge to robotics.



To solve the challenges humanoid robots face, Bosworth’s team is collaborating with the Superintelligence AI lab at Meta. They’re building what he calls a “world model”, which would help “do the software simulation required to animate a dexterous hand.” 

He explained that one of the biggest issues for robotics is building a hand that could pick up a glass of water or take a set of keys out of a pocket. Unlike walking and doing backflips, these actions require operating with an unstable object, which proves challenging for current humanoid robots. There’s no “sensor loop” for that task, so the company will have to build a data set for it, Bosworth said.

Another big bet from Meta

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