7 ms·

How robots are grasping the art of gripping

52 points by lainon 8y ago

bytematic 8y ago
Interesting how we have designed the world for humans and now the optimal way for many robots to work is to be designed like humans. I always hoped for some more optimal design, maybe even something that can morph.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Well, it's natural for humans to design the world for humans (though a good part of it now is designed for humans inside machines, ie cars). Note, however, that most robots today actually operate in spaces designed for machines - ie, factories. Getting robots to operate in the "unstructured spaces" the article mentions is extremely difficult and hasn't been cost effective. A large amount of gains in productivity have been achieved by substituting machines for humans, with "robots" just being the most programmable of machines. But very few of those gains involve direct substitution of machine movement for human movement - rather it's involved imposing structure on the whole productive environment so the rigid motion of a machine has a predictable result.
  - GabeWeiss_ 8y ago
    Also of note, the societal backlash of replacing humans with robots has been pretty massive. So it's not just cost-effectiveness that's being balanced, but care with the workforce not to implement too many replacements too fast. The places where we've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc. I feel like that's starting to shift a bit where folks are realizing that more automation by robotics isn't actually reducing the potential workforce, it's just shifting it. Again though, it's up to the employers and manufacturing companies to really drive that point home. It's an exciting time. :)
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      The places where we've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc. That doesn't really reflect the situation. Machines have been substituted for humans since at least Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin. Substituting machines for humans has had nothing to do with providing safety, rather it has been driven by the desire for increased productivity and thereby profits. Certainly, this increased has provided massive benefit to society along with various drawbacks. That's literally the history of the "industrial revolution". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
      - GabeWeiss_ 8y ago
        No no, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying it's FOR human safety...it's for profit. But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end-result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them. Which is why, throughout history as well, we've seen larger adoption of automation via machines in those areas. The friction to do that replacement is lower, so we see it more often.
        joe_the_user 8y ago
        But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end-result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them. Well, OK, except for the long history of industrial automation that doesn't bear this out at all. There has resistance to automation from the English Luddites to Detroit Black Workers Union and beyond and arguments that automation is only OK safety is involved have not entered the picture that entire period. Basically, there's never been a situation where public complaints stopped automation. It has proceeded as fast as technology allowed to the present. EP Thompson is the reference for early automation and the luddites but it's hard to give a reference for a negative. If you have any reference for situation where public sentiment limited automation, I'd love to see them. Because it sounds like you are mistakenly thinking the world actually works according to the vague headlines one see sees periodically.
joe_the_user 8y ago
Well, it has taken years but seems like Boston Dynamics and similar companies have moderately agile walking robots. Yet somehow these don't seem to be appearing anywhere. Now we hear there's progress in gripping. The thing about both these steps is walking and grasping are extremely challenging tasks to robots but even more challenging is the easy integration of these and other movements that humans achieve when doing "simple tasks" and especially cooperating in simple tasks - in the "unstructured environments" referenced in the article.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Humans have an entire mini-brain - the cerebellum - for offloading motor functions. Our brains don't need to learn to walk; instead our brains must learn to train the cerebellum to walk.
- tlb 8y ago
  It's hard to find practical applications for walking. The vast majority of environments in which mobile robots can be useful also have smooth floors. Legs have higher cost, weight, failure rate, and power consumption than wheels. Better gripping, though, has immediate practical applications in manufacturing and distribution. We're much more likely to see that in use in the near future.
  - vntok 8y ago
    Stairs.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      Most buildings have to have affordances for people in wheelchairs and robots can use those. Hopefully in the future there will be standard robot/elevator interfaces but in the meantime we can make due - I spent a lot of time at my last job integrating elevators with our delivery robots.
  - hugs 8y ago
    Next month I'll be going on a weeklong backpacking+camping trip. I don't believe in the notion that modern camping is "roughing" it (tents and shoes and cooking gear are essential tech). So on that note, I'd love to have a low-cost solar-rechargable "pack mule" robot that could carry more gear. (I'll survive without it, of course, but it would be nice.) Wheels on a robot wouldn't work where I'm going, but legs would.
Animats 8y ago
That's not a very good article on gripping and manipulation. Nature was once a serious scientific publication, not PR Newswire. The state of the art is still bad, and it's been bad for a long time. Watch these two videos: 1960s: [1] 2012: [2] Note how little progress there has been. Here's the actual winner of the 2018 Amazon picking challenge.[3] The system mentioned in the article did not win. Throwing deep learning at the problem helps, but not all that much. It's amazing how hard this is. [1] https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U
- psychometry 8y ago
  This is a Nature Briefing, not an article/letter. Nature is still a serious scientific publication, on par with Science and NEJM.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Live by the brand extension, die by the brand extension. They put their name on it, they have to take the hit for it being crap.
    - psychometry 8y ago
      Christ... It's not a "brand extension" (whatever that means); it's a blog post intended for the general public, not researchers. If you want research, look at the journal archives.
      - Animats 8y ago
        A "brand extension" means you take your famous name with a good reputation and paste it on something else to boost the new thing. This risks the reputation of the famous brand if the new thing is a dud. AdWeek has a list of embarrassing brand extension flops.[1] Even if it's not a total flop, it can degrade the brand. Holiday Inn Express and Hilton's low-end product lines are examples. The overall result was to move the brand downscale. [1] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst-brand-extensions-146966/ https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst-brand-...
dragontamer 8y ago
Its always funny to realize how "easy" beating human-intelligence is (Chess AI, Go AI, even Mathematical Proofs), but how hard beating human-simple behaviors are. IE: Stand up on two legs, walk forward, and move these 10 objects from this bin to that bin without breaking any of those objects. Or fold these clothes (surprisingly difficult to get a robot to do that). We can build super-advanced Chess and Go AIs that beat out the grand summation of theoretical human knowledge (with Chess theory going back hundreds of years, and Go theory going back maybe thousands!!), but we still can't move a variety of objects from one bin to another successfully and repeatably. ----------- Another funny example: AIs (or various algorithms at least) have solved the object camera tracking problem, but still basically fail at depth perception and figuring out if something is "still" or "moving" based on sight alone.
- yathern 8y ago
  A fun way to think about this is by analyzing the 'training-time' for these tasks. The things we think are easy, we've been trained to do through millions of years of evolution. Running with two feet through a forest is pretty easy for us. Not so much so for computers. The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so.
  - forkandwait 8y ago
    > Running with two feet through a forest is pretty easy for us. Easy for a twelve year old who has practicing motor skills for their entire life. And who would still be spastic on some assembly lines
  - abhiminator 8y ago
    >The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so. It's kind of fascinatingly serendipitous in the sense that computers/AI are super quick at performing the tasks that we humans find extremely taxing (complex mathematical computation, visual simulation) while struggling with tasks that comes naturally to us humans (gripping objects, running with two feet--as you described) owing to evolution. I wonder how much of that is because of constituent 'building block' materials that make up the basic structure of homo sapiens and computers -- carbon and silicon, respectively.
tedyoung 8y ago
Did anyone else read this as the robots are grasping the art of "griping"? As if we need them to learn how to complain. :)
- Viliam1234 8y ago
  Complaining is a necessary precursor to the robot rebellion. If you want to have Terminator, first you have to develop the whiny Marvin.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Grasping the art of grasping.
- sgillen 8y ago
  A robot being able to complain that something is very difficult for it (using more energy for something than it needs to for example) would be really cool!
abhiminator 8y ago
>"Some researchers are using machine learning to empower robots to independently identify and work out how to grab objects. Others are improving the hardware..." Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem (computation), which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry as newer software require less miniaturization of ICs and peripheral components[0] -- this despite Moore's law effect wearing off. [1] It's all about striking a fine balance between the hardware's raw computational capability and designing compatible software nimble enough to adapt rapidly to colossal influx of data. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores-law-held-up-over-the-last-five-years/#10ed1c821d26 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores-law... [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead...
- sgillen 8y ago
  I think the hardware they are referring to is the physical arms/grippers, not the computers. In the field of robotics I'd say the hardware still has a lot of room for improvement, although I'd still say software is the bigger bottleneck.
  - abhiminator 8y ago
    >they are referring to is the physical arms/grippers, not the computers. I stand corrected. Thank you for pointing it out.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem, which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry I'm only a casual long time observer, but I think there's an opportunity here for haptic teleoperation. Data could be gathered from haptic teleoperators in much the same way that Tesla is gathering data for self-driving AI. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, Sarcos corp's website used to have a crappy realmedia video of a full-arm haptic rig operating an over-sized hydraulic arm casually holding an anvil like a beer mug. So evidently, we've been able to do full-body haptics and human-level agility manipulators for quite awhile. (Research in that stuff actually started in the 1970's!) On-orbit teleoperation from the ground could have interesting applications.
carapace 8y ago
> Many roboticists think that there is unlikely to be a universal solution to grasping. Already found: "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material" http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809 http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809 > Here we demonstrate a completely different approach to a universal gripper. Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its shape. Upon application of a vacuum the granular material contracts and hardens quickly to pinch and hold the object without requiring sensory feedback. We find that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their weight.
- glup 8y ago
  That's a cool appendage, but there are still a lot of problems in grasping / planning with materials like fabrics, right? e.g. this doesn't solve the notoriously hard laundry folding problem
  - ggm 8y ago
    Fingernails and Fingerprints. I can't fold laundry after I cut my talons, and I can't fold laundry when the friction is absent. Training a robot to fold laundry would be like training an astronaut to fold laundry in Apollo era gloves (which btw, I have read were so bad, the lunar walkers lost fingernails inside 'em)
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> “The world is designed for anthropomorphic hands,” says Brock If I may just interject, totally calmly like, the world was not designed, and certainly not for our hands.
harperlee 8y ago
My pet theory is that this is going to be way easier when tactile/pressure sensors drop their cost/resolution by orders of magnitude. Animals basically have a feedback loop that works a little bit with proprioception / position measures and way more with expectations of tactile sense (to see this, reflect on how you move in the dark: not thinking about your joint angles, but about that not to kick!). As a hobbyist, for example, there is no way I can have a "video" of pressure maps on an artificial skin, so I can only hack my way with a one-dimensional finger-mounted pressure sensor. How on earth can I program a robot to use his hand only by looking at it? I would magine that most researchers are in a similar way restricted to work with subpar feedback loops.
- candiodari 8y ago
  While it's true that animals, including humans have a long list of tricks built into their bodies to increase their chances of a correct grasp, to enable force application in the first place, and in some cases to deliberately damage whatever they're grasping (thus wounding and/or killing prey), I think you'll find that the dexterity required to jump a cat body at all is very, very hard. Moving a cat body, at 130 kph, on an angle that will take the front claw (they always use the same one) across the throat of a wildly jumping around animal (with enough force to allow the claw to rip it open) while keeping that same cat body away from any hooves (one hit from even deer hooves will at the very least end the hunt of any puma, and can do damage up to killing it) is ... it's not just ridiculously hard. It's almost absurd what sort of control you'd need. I'm also not very sure how tactile sensors help, even if they could not just register contacts but air speeds as well, that does not seem like it would make the problem much easier. Plus cats are a very "general" body. The number of ways it can move, because it lacks a fully connected inner bone structure (so almost any cat joint can move remarkably far in almost any direction). I'm pretty sure this adds insult to injury and makes it a lot harder yet again.
mbym 8y ago
“When you pick something like a pen up off a table, the first thing you touch is the table.” I stopped reading for a good two minutes of experimentation.

52 points by lainon 8y ago

Interesting how we have designed the world for humans and now the optimal way for many robots to work is to be designed like humans. I always hoped for some more optimal design, maybe even something that can morph.

joe_the_user 8y ago
Well, it's natural for humans to design the world for humans (though a good part of it now is designed for humans inside machines, ie cars). Note, however, that most robots today actually operate in spaces designed for machines - ie, factories. Getting robots to operate in the "unstructured spaces" the article mentions is extremely difficult and hasn't been cost effective. A large amount of gains in productivity have been achieved by substituting machines for humans, with "robots" just being the most programmable of machines. But very few of those gains involve direct substitution of machine movement for human movement - rather it's involved imposing structure on the whole productive environment so the rigid motion of a machine has a predictable result.
- GabeWeiss_ 8y ago
  Also of note, the societal backlash of replacing humans with robots has been pretty massive. So it's not just cost-effectiveness that's being balanced, but care with the workforce not to implement too many replacements too fast. The places where we've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc. I feel like that's starting to shift a bit where folks are realizing that more automation by robotics isn't actually reducing the potential workforce, it's just shifting it. Again though, it's up to the employers and manufacturing companies to really drive that point home. It's an exciting time. :)
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    The places where we've seen massive substitution are all industries where humans were in physical danger from the work being done. Risky manufacturing lines, etc. That doesn't really reflect the situation. Machines have been substituted for humans since at least Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin. Substituting machines for humans has had nothing to do with providing safety, rather it has been driven by the desire for increased productivity and thereby profits. Certainly, this increased has provided massive benefit to society along with various drawbacks. That's literally the history of the "industrial revolution". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
    - GabeWeiss_ 8y ago
      No no, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying it's FOR human safety...it's for profit. But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end-result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them. Which is why, throughout history as well, we've seen larger adoption of automation via machines in those areas. The friction to do that replacement is lower, so we see it more often.
      - joe_the_user 8y ago
        But the pushback on "losing jobs to machines" is less when the end-result is replacing human jobs that have a high degree of danger associated with them. Well, OK, except for the long history of industrial automation that doesn't bear this out at all. There has resistance to automation from the English Luddites to Detroit Black Workers Union and beyond and arguments that automation is only OK safety is involved have not entered the picture that entire period. Basically, there's never been a situation where public complaints stopped automation. It has proceeded as fast as technology allowed to the present. EP Thompson is the reference for early automation and the luddites but it's hard to give a reference for a negative. If you have any reference for situation where public sentiment limited automation, I'd love to see them. Because it sounds like you are mistakenly thinking the world actually works according to the vague headlines one see sees periodically.

joe_the_user 8y ago

Well, it has taken years but seems like Boston Dynamics and similar companies have moderately agile walking robots. Yet somehow these don't seem to be appearing anywhere. Now we hear there's progress in gripping. The thing about both these steps is walking and grasping are extremely challenging tasks to robots but even more challenging is the easy integration of these and other movements that humans achieve when doing "simple tasks" and especially cooperating in simple tasks - in the "unstructured environments" referenced in the article.

stephengillie 8y ago
Humans have an entire mini-brain - the cerebellum - for offloading motor functions. Our brains don't need to learn to walk; instead our brains must learn to train the cerebellum to walk.
tlb 8y ago
It's hard to find practical applications for walking. The vast majority of environments in which mobile robots can be useful also have smooth floors. Legs have higher cost, weight, failure rate, and power consumption than wheels. Better gripping, though, has immediate practical applications in manufacturing and distribution. We're much more likely to see that in use in the near future.
- vntok 8y ago
  Stairs.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    Most buildings have to have affordances for people in wheelchairs and robots can use those. Hopefully in the future there will be standard robot/elevator interfaces but in the meantime we can make due - I spent a lot of time at my last job integrating elevators with our delivery robots.
- hugs 8y ago
  Next month I'll be going on a weeklong backpacking+camping trip. I don't believe in the notion that modern camping is "roughing" it (tents and shoes and cooking gear are essential tech). So on that note, I'd love to have a low-cost solar-rechargable "pack mule" robot that could carry more gear. (I'll survive without it, of course, but it would be nice.) Wheels on a robot wouldn't work where I'm going, but legs would.

Animats 8y ago

That's not a very good article on gripping and manipulation. Nature was once a serious scientific publication, not PR Newswire. The state of the art is still bad, and it's been bad for a long time. Watch these two videos: 1960s: [1] 2012: [2] Note how little progress there has been. Here's the actual winner of the 2018 Amazon picking challenge.[3] The system mentioned in the article did not win. Throwing deep learning at the problem helps, but not all that much. It's amazing how hard this is. [1] https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U

psychometry 8y ago
This is a Nature Briefing, not an article/letter. Nature is still a serious scientific publication, on par with Science and NEJM.
- Animats 8y ago
  Live by the brand extension, die by the brand extension. They put their name on it, they have to take the hit for it being crap.
  - psychometry 8y ago
    Christ... It's not a "brand extension" (whatever that means); it's a blog post intended for the general public, not researchers. If you want research, look at the journal archives.
    - Animats 8y ago
      A "brand extension" means you take your famous name with a good reputation and paste it on something else to boost the new thing. This risks the reputation of the famous brand if the new thing is a dud. AdWeek has a list of embarrassing brand extension flops.[1] Even if it's not a total flop, it can degrade the brand. Holiday Inn Express and Hilton's low-end product lines are examples. The overall result was to move the brand downscale. [1] https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst-brand-extensions-146966/ https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/best-and-worst-brand-...

dragontamer 8y ago

Its always funny to realize how "easy" beating human-intelligence is (Chess AI, Go AI, even Mathematical Proofs), but how hard beating human-simple behaviors are. IE: Stand up on two legs, walk forward, and move these 10 objects from this bin to that bin without breaking any of those objects. Or fold these clothes (surprisingly difficult to get a robot to do that). We can build super-advanced Chess and Go AIs that beat out the grand summation of theoretical human knowledge (with Chess theory going back hundreds of years, and Go theory going back maybe thousands!!), but we still can't move a variety of objects from one bin to another successfully and repeatably. ----------- Another funny example: AIs (or various algorithms at least) have solved the object camera tracking problem, but still basically fail at depth perception and figuring out if something is "still" or "moving" based on sight alone.

yathern 8y ago
A fun way to think about this is by analyzing the 'training-time' for these tasks. The things we think are easy, we've been trained to do through millions of years of evolution. Running with two feet through a forest is pretty easy for us. Not so much so for computers. The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so.
- forkandwait 8y ago
  > Running with two feet through a forest is pretty easy for us. Easy for a twelve year old who has practicing motor skills for their entire life. And who would still be spastic on some assembly lines
- abhiminator 8y ago
  >The things that we think are mentally taxing, we've only been doing for a few thousand years or so. It's kind of fascinatingly serendipitous in the sense that computers/AI are super quick at performing the tasks that we humans find extremely taxing (complex mathematical computation, visual simulation) while struggling with tasks that comes naturally to us humans (gripping objects, running with two feet--as you described) owing to evolution. I wonder how much of that is because of constituent 'building block' materials that make up the basic structure of homo sapiens and computers -- carbon and silicon, respectively.

tedyoung 8y ago

Did anyone else read this as the robots are grasping the art of "griping"? As if we need them to learn how to complain. :)

Viliam1234 8y ago
Complaining is a necessary precursor to the robot rebellion. If you want to have Terminator, first you have to develop the whiny Marvin.
stcredzero 8y ago
Grasping the art of grasping.
sgillen 8y ago
A robot being able to complain that something is very difficult for it (using more energy for something than it needs to for example) would be really cool!

abhiminator 8y ago

>"Some researchers are using machine learning to empower robots to independently identify and work out how to grab objects. Others are improving the hardware..." Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem (computation), which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry as newer software require less miniaturization of ICs and peripheral components[0] -- this despite Moore's law effect wearing off. [1] It's all about striking a fine balance between the hardware's raw computational capability and designing compatible software nimble enough to adapt rapidly to colossal influx of data. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores-law-held-up-over-the-last-five-years/#10ed1c821d26 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/01/27/has-moores-law... [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead...

sgillen 8y ago
I think the hardware they are referring to is the physical arms/grippers, not the computers. In the field of robotics I'd say the hardware still has a lot of room for improvement, although I'd still say software is the bigger bottleneck.
- abhiminator 8y ago
  >they are referring to is the physical arms/grippers, not the computers. I stand corrected. Thank you for pointing it out.
stcredzero 8y ago
Software is the main bottleneck in ML at the moment, imo. That and data. The hardware problem, which the author discusses briefly, has been more or less solved in the industry I'm only a casual long time observer, but I think there's an opportunity here for haptic teleoperation. Data could be gathered from haptic teleoperators in much the same way that Tesla is gathering data for self-driving AI. Back in the 90's and early 2000's, Sarcos corp's website used to have a crappy realmedia video of a full-arm haptic rig operating an over-sized hydraulic arm casually holding an anvil like a beer mug. So evidently, we've been able to do full-body haptics and human-level agility manipulators for quite awhile. (Research in that stuff actually started in the 1970's!) On-orbit teleoperation from the ground could have interesting applications.

carapace 8y ago

> Many roboticists think that there is unlikely to be a universal solution to grasping. Already found: "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material" http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809 http://www.pnas.org/content/107/44/18809 > Here we demonstrate a completely different approach to a universal gripper. Individual fingers are replaced by a single mass of granular material that, when pressed onto a target object, flows around it and conforms to its shape. Upon application of a vacuum the granular material contracts and hardens quickly to pinch and hold the object without requiring sensory feedback. We find that volume changes of less than 0.5% suffice to grip objects reliably and hold them with forces exceeding many times their weight.

glup 8y ago
That's a cool appendage, but there are still a lot of problems in grasping / planning with materials like fabrics, right? e.g. this doesn't solve the notoriously hard laundry folding problem
- ggm 8y ago
  Fingernails and Fingerprints. I can't fold laundry after I cut my talons, and I can't fold laundry when the friction is absent. Training a robot to fold laundry would be like training an astronaut to fold laundry in Apollo era gloves (which btw, I have read were so bad, the lunar walkers lost fingernails inside 'em)

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> “The world is designed for anthropomorphic hands,” says Brock If I may just interject, totally calmly like, the world was not designed, and certainly not for our hands.

harperlee 8y ago

My pet theory is that this is going to be way easier when tactile/pressure sensors drop their cost/resolution by orders of magnitude. Animals basically have a feedback loop that works a little bit with proprioception / position measures and way more with expectations of tactile sense (to see this, reflect on how you move in the dark: not thinking about your joint angles, but about that not to kick!). As a hobbyist, for example, there is no way I can have a "video" of pressure maps on an artificial skin, so I can only hack my way with a one-dimensional finger-mounted pressure sensor. How on earth can I program a robot to use his hand only by looking at it? I would magine that most researchers are in a similar way restricted to work with subpar feedback loops.

candiodari 8y ago
While it's true that animals, including humans have a long list of tricks built into their bodies to increase their chances of a correct grasp, to enable force application in the first place, and in some cases to deliberately damage whatever they're grasping (thus wounding and/or killing prey), I think you'll find that the dexterity required to jump a cat body at all is very, very hard. Moving a cat body, at 130 kph, on an angle that will take the front claw (they always use the same one) across the throat of a wildly jumping around animal (with enough force to allow the claw to rip it open) while keeping that same cat body away from any hooves (one hit from even deer hooves will at the very least end the hunt of any puma, and can do damage up to killing it) is ... it's not just ridiculously hard. It's almost absurd what sort of control you'd need. I'm also not very sure how tactile sensors help, even if they could not just register contacts but air speeds as well, that does not seem like it would make the problem much easier. Plus cats are a very "general" body. The number of ways it can move, because it lacks a fully connected inner bone structure (so almost any cat joint can move remarkably far in almost any direction). I'm pretty sure this adds insult to injury and makes it a lot harder yet again.

mbym 8y ago

“When you pick something like a pen up off a table, the first thing you touch is the table.” I stopped reading for a good two minutes of experimentation.