The main barrier and in my opinion the gap in robotics still is that joint proprioception/sensing and end effector sensing are still very far away from the richness and density of information any primate has in their arms and hands.
Robotic manipulators are the equivalent to being able to actuate your arms and hands while anaesthetized of most the sensory information out of your braquial nerve.
You can still actuate and complete most tasks with limited sensing and visual servoing but you will likely never perform at the level of yourself without any anaesthesia.
For an even more obvious intuition human finger tips have about 200 mecanoreceptors per square centimeter. That would be equivalent to a robotic grasper with 200x very sensitive 6DOF force sensors per square centimetre. And this is just one of our senses (You have specialized receptors for pressure, vibration, tensile force, temperature, 'pain' in skin, muscle, connective tissue, joint capsules,etc.)
I would add that my reaction on reading the paragraph about the "blue collar colleague" was "that's a health and safety nightmare. Never going to happen."
The thing about the real world is that it's a bit more complicated than desk work. Even roads, heavily simplified and standardised as they are, have proven challenging for self-driving cars.
An important question however is "how many sensors do you really need?"
Remember that humans have a lot of requirements just to not die. Robots don't have to care about being bit by insects, eaten by predators, or getting cuts in their skin that get infected. Getting damaged in any way just isn't that big of a concern. Ad a result, there is just a lot of robot 'skin' that doesn't need touch (etc.) sensing at all.
For the parts where it does matter, it's undoubtedly going to be the case that we can get 80% of the way there with 20% of the sensory information. Additionally, robots are not limited by the glacial speed of signals through nerves (100m/s max), but can leverage all other sensors and associated computation to compensate for 'missing' information.
Still, there's going to be a lot gained with good robot 'skin'.
doormatt•7mo ago
nh23423fefe•7mo ago