Xspark AI's Ding Wenbo on tactile intelligence: Robots need their own "spinal cord"

In an interview, Xspark AI co-founder and chief scientist Ding Wenbo proposed that vision has already solved about 99% of robot perception problems, and that touch should form a low-latency, body-adjacent "spinal cord"-level model rather than being directly integrated into vision large models. He proposed a three-layer architecture of "slow brain VLM—fast brain VTLA+TWAM—spinal cord VTA," arguing that touch mainly serves collision-avoidance safety and post-training for dexterous manipulation, and noted that current bottlenecks lie in sensor consistency, tactile data representation, and unification across sensors, modalities, and embodiments.