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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible how versatile our hands are. Simple pressure, two jawed chuck, three jawed chuck, four jawed chuck, roundgrip, tweezer grip, scoop and all that in a tiny, totally quiet package with force feedback across the whole surface.

Mimicking that mechanically is a major challenge, it has nothing to do with AI per se.

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It starts to click when you think about how many years it takes us to form those basic skills, refine them, and then the years spent practicing specific applications. All of this still requires dedicated trainers in the form of parents, driven by love and commitment.

It's not a trivial challenge in any form really.

Not even just on an individual basis. If you think about how long it took for dexterous hands to develop on an evolutionary basis, it took tens/hundreds of millions of years or even billions of years depending on where you start from.

Also, there is an interesting theory that humans hands not only evolved to grab things, human hands evolved to form "efficient" fists for punching.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-human-fi...

Even if I restrict myself to two fingers clamping around something, I can do ridiculously better than the robot. You could even give me the actual robot's hand on a grip. The control logic seems to be the much bigger problem to me.

Force feedback provides humans constant information on how our hands are doing.

Reliable force feedback data at our hand's level of detail would provide a wealth of data to those making the control software and that better software could benefit from real time data. The two problems are strongly interconnected.

I think his point stands though that you'd do much, much better than these robots even if you had to use a pair of tongs to do everything.

When we are small we barely do any better than current gen robots.

Thing is that each of us accumulate prior data that we can use as a basis for future action, things like how much pressure is enough for grasping a raw egg without breaking it.

I totally agree. (I only disagreed with the tiniest detail of his point and meant only to rebut that).

I would like to point that with pair of tongs you will still have force feedback. Even though is will be reduced in precision it will still be better than any artificial system I am aware.

It turns out you can make a very accurate, robust, and cheap force sensor by embedding a standard MEMS barometer in rubber.

http://www.takktile.com/main:tech

There are other methods of figuring out how much force a hand is exerting too.

I've seen AI learn to walk in simulation, I've never seen one learn to tie a shoe.

Because the developers have never seen the need...

That's not quite right. Both of those problems are actually pretty related and very active areas of research in academia.

> I've never seen one learn to tie a shoe.

For what it's worth I for example only learned to tie my shoes when I was already 9 years old, while I had learned to read almost all by myself at 5 (my dad had taught me the letters of the alphabet).

Not only that, but it's difficult to mathematically model deformable objects in ways that are computationally tractable (e.g. running on a 10ms update loop)

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