Morning Edition · Tuesday, October 6, 2026Published at 2:03 AM EDT · New York

Meta's open SAM and DINO vision models now run inside a federally funded wheelchair robot and five US national laboratories

The Pittsburgh assistive platform runs the models on the device itself to open doors and fetch objects, and at the Energy Department's labs the same models cut a month of manual image annotation per time step to 15 minutes.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) are building a robotic mobility and manipulation platform for people with disabilities, called the Robotic Assistive Mobility and Manipulation Plat…