Sanctuary AI Acquires Key IP Assets Related to Touch and Grasping, Vital to Building Truly General Purpose Robots

These assets come from those acquired from Giant.AI and the acquisition of Tangible Research, coupled with Sanctuary AI’s independent activity, opening up the immense potential of embodied AGI

VANCOUVER, CANADA – Sanctuary AI, a company on a mission to create the world's-first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots, today announced that it has acquired and is accumulating key IP assets related to touch and grasping which are vital to building truly general purpose robots. The coordination between touch sensors, that provide tactile feedback, and vision systems is critical to enabling embodied AGI. Sanctuary AI holds patents on several key technologies in this space, originating from a combination of internal filings and external acquisitions.

The field of AI is rapidly advancing and beginning to enable robots (both humanoid and non-humanoid) to become much more capable at performing tasks. The next wave of AI will be “grounding” AI in the physical world, or “real world AI” that will support the development of embodied AGI systems. 

Sanctuary AI’s growing patent portfolio already protects several key grasping technologies for both non-humanoid and humanoid robots, including: visual servoing, real-time simulation of the grasping process, and mapping between visual and haptic data. All of these are key to enabling any kind of robot that must interact with and manipulate objects in unstructured or dynamic environments.

“Replicating human-like touch is potentially more important than vision when it comes to grasping and manipulation in unstructured environments,” said Jeremy Fishel, Principal Researcher, Sanctuary AI and Founder, Tangible Research. “It has been an effort many years in the making to meet the complex blend of performance, features, and durability to achieve general purpose dexterity.”

“In dynamic and unstructured environments, coordination between touch and vision is an absolute necessity,” said Geordie Rose, former CEO and co-founder of Sanctuary AI. “We spent over a year performing industry wide analysis before acquiring Jeremy’s team. Beyond the functional sensitivity, the technology is designed to be simulatable, enabling us to fast track our AI model development.” 

This announcement comes on the heels of a busy year for Sanctuary AI. The company unveiled its sixth-generation general purpose robots, named Phoenix™, powered by its pioneering AI control system, Carbon™ in May of 2023. You can see Phoenix do things like placing items in a plastic bag, stacking blocks, and more as part of Sanctuary AI’s “Robots Doing Stuff” series on its YouTube channel. The growing team moved into a state-of-the-art office and lab space while also receiving recognition from LinkedIn as a Top Startup along with its technology being recognized as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023.  

To learn more about Sanctuary AI’s mission, Carbon, Phoenix, and the team — which includes world-renowned experts in AI, machine learning, and robotics — visit the official company website: https://sanctuary.ai 

About Sanctuary AI

Founded in 2018, Sanctuary AI is a multi-award-winning company based in Vancouver, Canada. Sanctuary AI is on a mission to create the world's first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots that will help us work more safely, efficiently, and sustainably, helping to address the labor challenges facing many organizations today. Sanctuary AI's growing list of customers and investors represents a wide variety of industries across Canada, the US, and other countries around the world.

Members of the Sanctuary team founded D-Wave (a pioneer in the quantum computing industry), Kindred (first use of reinforcement learning in a production robot), and the Creative Destruction Lab (pioneered a revolutionary method for the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind). With experience at startups and technology leaders such as Amazon, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Samsung, the team has experience launching market-defining innovations rooted in previously unsolved and deep scientific problems.