Ant's Robbyant Open-Sources LingBot-Touch Tactile Foundation Model
Ant Group's Robbyant team (Zhipingfang) has released the open-source tactile foundation model LingBot-Touch for dexterous manipulation. It's on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. Built on a JEPA architecture with 5.46 million parameters, the model was pretrained on nearly 5,000 hours of real tactile data collected from gloved human hands and robot fingertip sensors.
Confirmed
- Available in Tiny and Small sizes, open-sourced on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0
- Unified heterogeneous tactile modeling enables transfer across sensors, dexterous hands, tasks, and action models
- Per @AlternativeSet4042, real-robot deployment paired with pi0.5 raised the task score from 48 to 70
- The model is a 5.46-million-parameter tactile encoder
Why it matters
- Internet data taught models to see and speak, but not what it feels like to hold a cup; LingBot-Touch targets exactly this gap
- @AlternativeSet4042 notes that two prior preprints applied GPT-6 Astra tactile images to manipulation tasks, but were validated only in simulation, with one taking a median 14 seconds per call; LingBot-Touch's small footprint and real-robot validation stand in contrast, offering a practically deployable open-source baseline for tactile manipulation.
2026-11-10 ~ 2026-11-11 · 30 related posts
Primary sources
- LingBot-Touch tactile foundation model unifies heterogeneous sensors for dexterous manipulation — robbyant ·
- Robbyant's LingBot-Touch cuts cross-sensor tactile error by ~97% on unseen robot hand — omarsar0 ·
- 5.5M-param tactile encoder hits real hands, lifts pi0.5 scores from 48 to ~70 — Alternative_Set4042 ·
- [source] 5.5M-param tactile encoder hits real hands, lifts pi0.5 scores from 48 to ~70 — Alternative_Set4042 · 2026-11-10
- Ant Group's Robbyant open-sources LingBot Touch, a JEPA-based tactile foundation model — AdinaYakup · 2026-11-10
- Open-source tactile foundation model LingBot-Touch trained on ~5,000 hours of real data — Shruti_0810 · 2026-11-10
- Ant's LingBot-Touch: open-source tactile foundation model boosts dexterous manipulation across 26 tasks — 新智元 · 2026-11-10
- Robbyant's LingBot-Touch: a tactile foundation model trained on 5,000 hours of real data — 机器之心 · 2026-11-10
- Robbyant releases LingBot-Touch, a tactile model giving robot hands human-like touch sensing — CyberRobooo · 2026-11-10
- LingBot-Touch unifies three tactile sensor types using 4,983 hours of real recordings — CyberRobooo · 2026-11-10
- How LingBot-Touch works: one shared Haptic Transformer unifies magnetic, piezoresistive and visuotactile signals — CyberRobooo · 2026-11-10
- LingBot-Touch lifts VLA success rate from 45.6% to 72.5%, pretrained on 4,983 hours of tactile data — CyberRobooo · 2026-11-10
- Ant Lingbo open-sources LingBot-Touch: tactile tokens lift robot zipper success from 15% to 59% — 赛博禅心 · 2026-11-10
- [source] LingBot-Touch tactile foundation model unifies heterogeneous sensors for dexterous manipulation — robbyant · 2026-11-10
- LingBot-Touch: a foundation model for heterogeneous tactile representation learning lands on HF — _akhaliq · 2026-11-10
- LingBot-Touch links: technical report, GitHub repo, and Hugging Face all public — aigclink · 2026-11-10
- Robbyant open-sources LingBot-Touch, a JEPA-based tactile foundation model for dexterous manipulation — pmttyji · 2026-11-10
- Ant's Robbyant trains LingBot-Touch: 2.5h of labels teach robot hands to sense force — heyshrutimishra · 2026-11-10
- Ant Group's Robbyant gets LingBot-Touch to read force it was never taught — heyshrutimishra · 2026-11-10
- Robbyant open-sources LingBot-Touch, giving robots fingertip touch sense with JEPA encoders — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-11-10
- Robbyant open-sources LingBot-Touch, a tactile foundation model trained on 4,983 hours of data — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-11-10
- Ant-backed open-source touch encoder lifts π0.5 robot success from 48% to 70% — kimmonismus · 2026-11-11
- Learned touch tokens add 14–25 points over raw signals across four policies — kimmonismus · 2026-11-11
- 5,000 hours of paid touch data: robotics' scarcest, unscrapeable training input — kimmonismus · 2026-11-11
- One touch encoder generalizes across sensors, cutting contact error to 0.16mm — kimmonismus · 2026-11-11
8 near-duplicate retellings: dair_ai · Div_pradeep · HeyAmit_ · aftahi_ai · alifcoder · aigclink · omarsar0 · kimmonismus