
How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can - kjhughes
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/30/technology/robot-hands.html
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ColinWright
Same story yesterday, discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17645456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17645456)

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joe_the_user
Well,

The thing about adding capabilities to robot hands is it shows how far we have
to go also.

One could give a hand 100 different generic manipulation skills like moving
cubes and rectangles but that would still result in something far, far away
from the human ability to take an object and accomplish a goal with that
object - say a task summarized as "take this shovel and dig a hole to put this
post in." and even if a robot could accomplish a given as a sequence of
primitives, such actions would be quite inefficient compared to the how a
human acts, which is to formulate various arcs of force and movement specific
to the task at hand.

This is why Boston Dynamics robots, which clearly can walk, seem to never
deployed in situations where you'd imagine a walking robot would be useful
(while horses, with "horse sense" wind-up deployed reasonably often in such
situations).

