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Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard
You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots.
The factory-type tasks done by Figure’s 02, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, and Apptronik’s Apollo all appear to involve moving large, rigid objects in relatively straightforward ways, and they often seem to struggle with precise, subtle movements. Google DeepMind has several videos showing a Gemini-powered pair of robot arms doing dexterously demanding tasks like autonomously manipulating a timing belt, folding origami, and plugging in an electrical socket. On the other hand, I can imagine progress being much slower if performance improvement ends up requiring capturing a lot of high-fidelity tactile data from hardware that doesn’t exist yet.
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