The ongoing challenge of building a robot that can mimic the mesmerizing complexity of the human hand. IEEE Spectrum:
“Hands are a ruthless design trade-off,” Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, tells IEEE Spectrum. “There’s no way around it, you’re always giving up on something. And many of the current designs are giving up on things like reliability and manufacturability.” This is what invariably happens when you try and cram everything necessary to make a robotic hand function within the form factor of a human hand: It’s going to be either very fragile or very expensive, and likely both at the same time. The unfortunate reality is that for now, and likely for the immediate future, all that these sorts of hands are good for are research and demos.
How Atlas’ Four Finger Robot Hand Gets Superhuman Grip and Controlspectrum.ieee.orgMaking a hand that’s capable, reliable, and manufacturable is a very hard problem