Hacker News Reader

Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Nice project! Anyway, one of the unrealistic details is that the robot in the simulation curls the fingers when it is not using them. In particular the pinky finger. Can that be fixed in a future version? For comparison, I got this as the first result in Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYyOY4XaFs

It's also strange that all fingers are always parallel, but I guess that adding that freedom makes the search space huge.

View on HN

I don't think the intention of this simulation is to be realistic. This particular agent just learned to play the music it was reinforced to learn given the physics constraints programmed for the hand mechanics (as far as I understand it). I doubt the physics emulate our human hands very accurately so I wouldn't expect it to be "realistic" or something that needs to be "fixed" unless the specific intention was to optimize actual human hand movements.

Yup, we're not trying to mimic human movements exactly but rather optimizing for the reward given the robot hardware. Fun fact, we do things like add an energy penalty to try and reduce jitteriness / un-human like movements and it does help enormously.

I understand that the research objective is not a human like movement, but I think changing the rewards to keep the fingers straight will get nicer videos to show, and I don't expect it to be too hard.

Another question: The pinky finger is not shorter than the other fingers. Can it be a problem for the robot to use the human fingering?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com