Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey they're I'm welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says caused the
Speaker 1: be Bop Stork was about to arrive, Mama gave birth
Speaker 1: to the hand Jive. I'm Jonathan Stricklin and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And here on this show where we often talk about
Speaker 1: robotics and the future of machines replacing us, helping us,
Speaker 1: mostly replacing us. Uh yeah, we sometimes have to take
Speaker 1: stock of the things that still fall under the category
Speaker 1: of humans can definitely do them better than machines. Right
Speaker 1: until recently, one of those things was playing the game
Speaker 1: Go not anymore anymore joined chess and checkers in the
Speaker 1: field tik tac toe. Yeah, the computers are so totally
Speaker 1: better than the hermon Nuclear war Yeah probably. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean in the movie War Games, it's it's definitive.
Speaker 1: You know, when I said tick tek to, I think
Speaker 1: what I meant was connect for now that is a
Speaker 1: solved game that computers can always beat us in. But
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure they can at least force a draw
Speaker 1: or tecto. But anyway, Yeah, so always doing better than us.
Speaker 1: Of course, they can drive cars better than us. That's
Speaker 1: been clearly demonstrated now with one crash out of one
Speaker 1: crash caused by a robotic car out of all the
Speaker 1: ones that have actually all the miles and miles millions
Speaker 1: of miles driven by robotic cars. I think even that
Speaker 1: one's kind of question. Well, you're talking about where it went,
Speaker 1: where it got hit by the bus. I was trying
Speaker 1: to merge Google. It's Googled themselves said, you know that
Speaker 1: they accepted responsibility for that, but partial at fall it
Speaker 1: was a little bit of a backheaded acceptance because they said, like, well,
Speaker 1: we just anticipated that the bus driver would slow down there,
Speaker 1: Like well if the bus had been not a shirt, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's that. You know. One thing I remember coming
Speaker 1: across a couple of years ago, I think is that
Speaker 1: even now now, computers are even better at reading micro
Speaker 1: expressions on human faces than humans are. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: they can tell when someone's disgusted or bored or whatever
Speaker 1: better than we can. Yeah. I definitely I have encountered
Speaker 1: humans that I know clearly lacked some of that ability
Speaker 1: where I'm like, I can't get out of this conversation.
Speaker 1: No matter what I do, you have to actually tell
Speaker 1: them explicitly stopped talking to me. Yeah, I've also been
Speaker 1: guilty of doing that. I just carry around plasmic grenades
Speaker 1: and what I'm done with a conversation and just stick
Speaker 1: it right to their face. I was just going with
Speaker 1: the ninja smoke pomps. Just then run. You know, for
Speaker 1: a while the robots were pretty bad at walking on
Speaker 1: uneven surfaces, but they're even closed in the gap on
Speaker 1: that those Boston Dynamic spots. Although if you watch that
Speaker 1: DARPA Grand Challenge where it had the sequence of tasks
Speaker 1: that the robots had to be able to complete, we
Speaker 1: saw that robots still find certain tasks really challenging, especially bipedales,
Speaker 1: like like opening a door and walking through it. Well,
Speaker 1: bipedal is a terrible system for anyone to use. Even
Speaker 1: our own spines are really meant to be like Crawley spines. No,
Speaker 1: they're meant to sit in front of a computer. I
Speaker 1: sure hope so, because that's kind of what I'm doing. Well,
Speaker 1: it's true. What one of the biggest problems left for
Speaker 1: machines is dexterity diverse object manipulation on the small scale,
Speaker 1: So you deal with this skill every day. You use
Speaker 1: it all the time handling various objects, especially delicate objects
Speaker 1: with precision. One definition that comes from some researchers that
Speaker 1: we're going to cite later in the episode puts dexterity
Speaker 1: as quote many independently controlled degrees of freedom, speed, strength,
Speaker 1: and compliance. I think that pretty well summarizes it. It's
Speaker 1: what you do with your hands to get all the
Speaker 1: different jobs you need to do done without crushing everything
Speaker 1: you touch in the pro or injuring yourself. Yeah. For example, Uh,
Speaker 1: we can use our hands to manipulate all sorts of
Speaker 1: different objects pretty readily, even if we haven't come into
Speaker 1: contact with them before. Just through the experimentation of touching
Speaker 1: the object and then you get a feel for what
Speaker 1: the object is like, you kind of I get an
Speaker 1: idea immediately. How much pressure should you use when picking
Speaker 1: up the object. When it's something squishy like a banana,
Speaker 1: you know not to squeeze so hard that it squirts
Speaker 1: out both ends. But also if it's like a prickly,
Speaker 1: uh sweet gumball or something, you realize those points, like
Speaker 1: if you use too much pressure, you're going to hurt
Speaker 1: yourself and you know to be gentle with it. And
Speaker 1: you also get a feel immediately how heavy that object is,
Speaker 1: so you know how much force to use when lifting.
Speaker 1: These are things that are intuitive to us, but robots
Speaker 1: don't have intuition, except they kind of can if you
Speaker 1: go with machine learning. But we'll get to that. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think that as well, said Jonathan. So think about
Speaker 1: it this way. When you pick up a banana and
Speaker 1: then peel that banana, and then pick up a knife
Speaker 1: with your other hand, and then slice that banana over
Speaker 1: a bowl of cereal. This may be a simple action
Speaker 1: to you, but this is horrifying warlock magic to robots. Right.
Speaker 1: We we have nothing even close to being able to
Speaker 1: do this unless there's a robot that has been painstakingly
Speaker 1: explicitly programmed specifically for this task, which I haven't heard of.
Speaker 1: If there is, and if there is, it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder what better things people could have done with their
Speaker 1: time rather than training a robot to slice a banana
Speaker 1: into cereals robot. But yes, that's true. That's that's a
Speaker 1: kind of good example of the the idea of explicit
Speaker 1: programming versus a sort of generalist adaptable programming. But yet
Speaker 1: gentle variable, dextrous and deft control of objects in the hands.
Speaker 1: That's just something that robots are not at yet. And
Speaker 1: another thing is that watching video of robots trying to
Speaker 1: achieve this is often really funny. Now. I watched one
Speaker 1: recently where they weren't very um advanced robotic hands. They
Speaker 1: were actually pretty simple clamps. Clamps there, clamps. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was essentially it was a two pronged kind of hand, right,
Speaker 1: like like just just clamp. Yeah, and uh, but it
Speaker 1: had a box full of different objects, and the robotic
Speaker 1: arms or the hands rather, we're quote unquote learning how
Speaker 1: to pick up those different objects. And they would attempt
Speaker 1: to pick up an object and start to learn from uh,
Speaker 1: trial and error how that was not working properly or
Speaker 1: what did work properly, and it would try to replicate
Speaker 1: that in the future attempt. And it was a box
Speaker 1: full of tons of different stuff, like, uh, staplers, and
Speaker 1: it was mostly office equipment type stuff staplers and and
Speaker 1: and tape and that kind of thing. And they were
Speaker 1: supposed to pick up the staplers and so for a while,
Speaker 1: you know, they're just kind of fumbling around trying to
Speaker 1: find the best way to get a grip on the
Speaker 1: staplers and eventually started to figure it out pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: Then they started to go with more advanced approaches, uh,
Speaker 1: which the hands were learning on their own, direct developing
Speaker 1: these techniques on their own where they would knock an
Speaker 1: object that they didn't want out of the way in
Speaker 1: order to be able to get a grip on the
Speaker 1: object they did want. So it's kind of like you
Speaker 1: know a human where you see a pile of stuff
Speaker 1: and the thing you want is under something else. You
Speaker 1: just kind of move the thing on top in order
Speaker 1: to get it to the thing that you actually want.
Speaker 1: And it was fascinating to watch. It was very funny
Speaker 1: because at the beginning it was just chaos. Right, It's
Speaker 1: just robot hands going everywhere in this box of stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like the hands in that office simulator game talk
Speaker 1: about just throwing things randomly in different directions. Exactly. Yeah, So, okay,
Speaker 1: now we're we're criticizing the current dexterous nous, dexterousness, dexterity,
Speaker 1: dexterity of robot hands. But you might be thinking, wait
Speaker 1: a second, now, I thought that there were industrial robot
Speaker 1: arms and so forth, all kinds of robotic effectors that
Speaker 1: carry out very precise jobs like machining, assembly, and manipulation.
Speaker 1: Job and they do, yeah, they certainly do. But these
Speaker 1: robots have been explicitly programmed for a very specific job
Speaker 1: that they do over and over again. It's worth the
Speaker 1: time for somebody to figure out exactly what motions they
Speaker 1: need to make and teach them how to do that,
Speaker 1: because they're going to be doing the same thing maybe
Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives or at least for
Speaker 1: one long production run. Right. It's it's the idea of
Speaker 1: of using a robot instead of a human for those
Speaker 1: those uh jobs that have really tedious, replicated work that
Speaker 1: you have to do adding a single part to a
Speaker 1: larger thing over and over and over, right, or welding
Speaker 1: a door to a car frame, that kind of stuff
Speaker 1: where you know it's something that would be dull or
Speaker 1: dangerous or dirty. That's the three DS that we often
Speaker 1: get for the kind of jobs that robots are best
Speaker 1: suited for. And as long as it is a task
Speaker 1: that is going to be exactly the same time after time,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry as much about the um
Speaker 1: the general dexterity. You just have to you just have
Speaker 1: to make it really good at specific movements. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: thing that it does. And so industrial robot might be
Speaker 1: able to, for example, place a ball bearing in a
Speaker 1: machine slot with precision over and over again. But if
Speaker 1: you try to get that same robot arm with its
Speaker 1: same end defect or to open up a ketchup packet
Speaker 1: or something, well, let's see how well it does. End defector,
Speaker 1: by the way, is the industry term for thing at
Speaker 1: the end of a robot arm. Yeah, it's the part
Speaker 1: of the robot that the robot uses to interact with
Speaker 1: the world. So this could be like a welding tor
Speaker 1: to drill, a puncturing style, as a suction cup, a claw,
Speaker 1: a clamp, or maybe a hand, maybe a humanoid hand
Speaker 1: with five fingers. But hey, you might also be thinking, now,
Speaker 1: didn't you guys talk in the past about robotic surgeons
Speaker 1: and how these robotic these surgical robots could give surgeons
Speaker 1: really incredible precision in laparoscopic procedures reaching into the body,
Speaker 1: And yeah, that is also true with precision cutting sutures
Speaker 1: and a tiny, tiny little movements. There is precision in
Speaker 1: these robotic tools. But a couple of things. Number One,
Speaker 1: they're controlled by humans, So What they do is they
Speaker 1: translate large movements of a controller's hands into very tiny,
Speaker 1: precise movements in reality. And this is something that anyone
Speaker 1: who has used a computer in the last thirty years
Speaker 1: has had experience with, because your mouse does the same thing.
Speaker 1: When you move a mouse, you're moving it, uh a
Speaker 1: small Well, it's it's kind of the opposite side. That's
Speaker 1: the same principle, but in opposite right in scale of me. Exactly,
Speaker 1: you move the mouse a little bit and the the
Speaker 1: arrow will move a greater amount on your screen. Because
Speaker 1: if you had to move the mouse exactly the same
Speaker 1: distance as the cursor needs to travel, you would need
Speaker 1: a really big desk. But yeah, so it's the it's
Speaker 1: the same principle, just in reverse, right. Uh. And also
Speaker 1: the robots in these cases, they have a limited number
Speaker 1: of objects and tools they're designed to interact with. Uh.
Speaker 1: And as we said, it's directly controlled by human operator.
Speaker 1: So it's not the same thing as the needing a
Speaker 1: robot that has the kind of dexterity of a human hand. Now,
Speaker 1: some robots can achieve more variable motion, uh, not by
Speaker 1: having a really really powerfully generalist in defector like a
Speaker 1: human hand, but just being able to like switch out tools, right,
Speaker 1: Oh sure, yeah, just sort of like a plug and
Speaker 1: play kind of option of like, well, I need a
Speaker 1: clamp for this, and I need a blowtorch for that.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to put a blowtorch on the clamp.
Speaker 1: I'm going to switch out my robot in defector hand.
Speaker 1: So clearly it's like Dustin Hoffman's hook in the movie
Speaker 1: of the same name, where he could switch the hook
Speaker 1: out his other hook he has. He has one that
Speaker 1: is a double cigarette hold, right, and he has one
Speaker 1: that's a magnifying glass. Yeah. Does he have one that's
Speaker 1: a hand mirror? He might have. Yeah, he did have
Speaker 1: one that was a mirror. You're right. Yeah, it's when
Speaker 1: he's being um attended to by smee. Yeah, where his
Speaker 1: his mustache is being perfectly curled. I can I can
Speaker 1: respect that. Yeah, yeah, but the same sort of thing. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: so we've discussed all the reasons that robots generally just
Speaker 1: have a very specific type of end defectory that's for
Speaker 1: the job they do. But why would you maybe need
Speaker 1: a robot to have something more like a human hand. Joe,
Speaker 1: let me let me run this by you. We humans
Speaker 1: we've been around. The stuff that we've built, we've built
Speaker 1: for ourselves for the most part, and and we humans,
Speaker 1: uh many of us, have hands, and so the stuff
Speaker 1: we have built has been meant for creatures that have hands.
Speaker 1: And therefore the world that we interact with, particularly the
Speaker 1: the man made portion of that world, is really hand centric.
Speaker 1: So if you want to interact with that world, hand
Speaker 1: are pretty much where it's at. So what you're saying
Speaker 1: is that asking a robot to move around in the
Speaker 1: human world is unbearably cruel and frustrating if that robot
Speaker 1: does not have hands and you need it to do
Speaker 1: things that hands would come in really handy. Yes, I like,
Speaker 1: if you ask a rumba to open a door, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: that's just not happening. Trying to get clamps to break
Speaker 1: the yard for you, It's gonna have a hard time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean what I Here's the funny thing is that
Speaker 1: as a left hander, UM, I encounter a tiny percentage
Speaker 1: of the frustration that if a robot could feel it,
Speaker 1: it's certainly would feel in a world that is made
Speaker 1: for people who are predominantly right hand dominant. Right, So
Speaker 1: I have this little experience where when I want to
Speaker 1: interact with tools. I need to use certain things. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it is counterintuitive and difficult, and sometimes even in the
Speaker 1: case of chainsaws, dangerous for a left hander to wield.
Speaker 1: And so uh it there and think, well, I actually
Speaker 1: have hands. It's just that I'm dominant with my left hand,
Speaker 1: not my right hand. For robots that don't have hands,
Speaker 1: then these problems are magnified by orders of magnitude, and
Speaker 1: so so the robots that exist today with very specific
Speaker 1: in defectors are not really a problem because they don't
Speaker 1: come into our world. They're not supposed to be able
Speaker 1: to do all the things we do. But people project
Speaker 1: that in the future, maybe in the next couple of decades,
Speaker 1: we're going to start introducing robots that are not the
Speaker 1: specialists that robots have always been, but their generalists. And
Speaker 1: they're not segregated from us in the way robots have
Speaker 1: always been. They're integrated into our lives. They live with us,
Speaker 1: and they do the same kinds of jobs we do.
Speaker 1: And so, for exactly the reason you point out, these
Speaker 1: robots need to be able to touch the same things
Speaker 1: we touch, and touch them in the same way, manipulate
Speaker 1: them in the same way to to be able to
Speaker 1: handle the stuff we handle without smashing it or dropping
Speaker 1: it or not knowing what to do with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: otherwise you end up having to redesign all the tools, right,
Speaker 1: you'd have to redesign the tools for the robots, which
Speaker 1: seems like that would be a whole lot more work,
Speaker 1: depending on how tricky it is to really get a
Speaker 1: good set of robotic hands. Also, I want to point
Speaker 1: out I'm so sad that our listeners can't watch this
Speaker 1: podcast because we are just naturally gesturing with our hands
Speaker 1: a whole bunch a lot to begin with. That's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I do make a lot of crab claw emotions in general,
Speaker 1: and most podcasts, that's true, full of clamps. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: another thing, so one of them. One of the things
Speaker 1: is that we want generalist robots rather than specialist robots
Speaker 1: to be able to integrate into our lives in the future.
Speaker 1: But the other one is just the The human hand
Speaker 1: is an amazingly remarkably powerful machine. It's it's a it's
Speaker 1: a miracle of nature. It can be adapted to so
Speaker 1: many different jobs. And this isn't just because it's natural.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not saying any biological version of an
Speaker 1: indefector would be able to do this because think about
Speaker 1: a crabs claw or an ants four limbs. They can't
Speaker 1: do all the things that the primate hand can do.
Speaker 1: It's the primate hand, and specifically that's so amazingly powerful.
Speaker 1: It can push, pull, punch, pinch, slap, climb, throw, place
Speaker 1: things definitely, I mean it can do in thousands of things.
Speaker 1: And and it can do all these things with objects
Speaker 1: of vastly varying size, weight, and shape. The minimum roboticists
Speaker 1: say that you need to to approximate to human hands
Speaker 1: gripping and manipulation capacity is nine degrees of freedom. That's
Speaker 1: that's three fingers capable of moving in a three dimensional space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I feel like I've seen robotic hands that are
Speaker 1: basically three fingers. Yeah. Yeah, it looks a little bit
Speaker 1: like a like a nightcrawler hand. Yeah, um um. But
Speaker 1: but a fully functional hand is a lot more complicated
Speaker 1: than that. Yeah. The human the human hand has more
Speaker 1: than twenty independent degrees of freedom. I think I've seen
Speaker 1: somebody say twenty seven somewhere. That might be a disputable number,
Speaker 1: but definitely more than twenty. Uh. And it's controlled by
Speaker 1: more than thirty muscles, which in in robotics terms would
Speaker 1: be actuators. Yeah, and so, uh, you know, when you
Speaker 1: think about something that complex. Now, let's let's be fair.
Speaker 1: The human hand has had the benefit of millions of
Speaker 1: years of evolution to lead to that that that approach, right.
Speaker 1: Robotic hands, on the other hand, have had a few decades. Right,
Speaker 1: So we are trying to replicate what took nature millions
Speaker 1: of years to create. And uh, and so we shouldn't
Speaker 1: be so not skeptical, but so dismissive of how quote
Speaker 1: unquote primitive robotic hands are right now, because honestly, they're
Speaker 1: getting to be pretty sophisticated. And also, I did want
Speaker 1: to point out that, you know, just because the human
Speaker 1: hand works so for us, doesn't necessarily mean that it's
Speaker 1: the only design that we can come up with. It
Speaker 1: can do this kind of amazing stuff. There's some really
Speaker 1: cool generalist end defectors that are being designed that look
Speaker 1: nothing like a human hand. I wanted to mention one
Speaker 1: sort of as an example of how advanced they can
Speaker 1: be yet yet still failed to match our hands design ultimately,
Speaker 1: and I think we've we've mentioned this type on on
Speaker 1: the show before. Um, it's based on jamming transition technology
Speaker 1: and okay, and in physics, jamming is what happens when
Speaker 1: granular materials that would usually flow, like a sand or
Speaker 1: sugar or coffee grounds or whatever, they become rigid when
Speaker 1: they're like really packed in. Yeah. Like like if if,
Speaker 1: if you've ever handled a package of vacuum sealed coffee grounds,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a brick. It's solid, completely solid, but
Speaker 1: but if you open it up, you can pour the
Speaker 1: grounds into your coffee maker. Um sand flows through our glasses,
Speaker 1: but in a hack sec it becomes a solid, bouncy unit. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: and I like that. We I think this is the
Speaker 1: second mention of hackey sex we've had in this episode
Speaker 1: so far. Good times. I think we actually mentioned hacky
Speaker 1: sex before we start. It's okay because it's always in
Speaker 1: our hearts and sometimes on our knees and feet. Jonathan,
Speaker 1: were you a high school hacky sack? I am not
Speaker 1: answering that question, Joe, please go on, Lauren, no problem, Jonathan, Okay, So, So,
Speaker 1: jamming transition, which is the jamming transition technology, is the
Speaker 1: word I used before, the term I used before. A
Speaker 1: jamming transition occurs when grains of stuff become dense enough
Speaker 1: to act as a solid. And this, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: is a really useful property because researchers figured out that
Speaker 1: if you fill a soft rubber ball with a granular
Speaker 1: material and then attached that rubber ball to the end
Speaker 1: of a vacuum tube, you can quickly and easily move
Speaker 1: air into and out of the ball, thus changing the
Speaker 1: density and the behavior year of the material inside um.
Speaker 1: And you can use such a device to to grip
Speaker 1: and handle objects of all kinds of different shapes and
Speaker 1: sizes because they mold to it. And and then like
Speaker 1: if you've got a lego brick, the ball can bend
Speaker 1: around the top of the brick or the top of
Speaker 1: a bottle cap and solidify around it in order to
Speaker 1: pick it up. Then it can soften again to put
Speaker 1: it down. And this is pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: might have you might have seen one that the bright
Speaker 1: green versible um. It looks like a like a weird
Speaker 1: little tennis ball on the end of a tube. And
Speaker 1: and about a year or two ago, I think there
Speaker 1: were a lot of videos going around interesting. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's great. It's really fascinating and beautiful to
Speaker 1: watch inaction. Also, it can't play a piano at all.
Speaker 1: It would suck at that. What's amazing to me is
Speaker 1: that this actually reminds me of I saw a comedy show.
Speaker 1: It was improvised comedy show, and one of the characters
Speaker 1: in the show was a robot that had become horrified
Speaker 1: that had had killed his best friend because did not
Speaker 1: realize that humans can't reboot, and so had replaced replaced
Speaker 1: these hands. He would say that over and over in
Speaker 1: the episode. He replaced his hands with oven mits filled
Speaker 1: with cookie dough, is what he described it, so that
Speaker 1: way he could no longer hurt anything. It would just
Speaker 1: flop against people and uh and it was. It was
Speaker 1: hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. So when you're
Speaker 1: describing this like, I can't believe that that incredibly weird
Speaker 1: improvised comedy thing I saw fifteen years ago is kind
Speaker 1: of sort of the same thing you're talking about. It's
Speaker 1: just it's just it's a cookie dough. It would be
Speaker 1: some sort of granular type stuff. But that's amazing and weird.
Speaker 1: Are the are the future thinkers? I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: the Jules Verne of today. I have to I have
Speaker 1: to let him know. I know the guy who did it,
Speaker 1: so I have to tell him, Hey, you were prescient
Speaker 1: in your goofy makeup ups. Some people who have been
Speaker 1: working with robot hands even earlier than this improv team
Speaker 1: of yours. Um was it? Was it with Dad's Garage,
Speaker 1: Christ's Garage. You guys, if you're ever in Atlanta, if
Speaker 1: you're from Atlanta, you should totally check out the work
Speaker 1: that Dad's Garage does. It's a terrific theater company anyway.
Speaker 1: Um okay, So, so even before Dad's Garage, people were
Speaker 1: working on robot hands. And if we were going to
Speaker 1: go into the full history of this, it would the
Speaker 1: history of the development in the technology. That would be
Speaker 1: a whole episode unto itself, probably a couple And maybe
Speaker 1: we should do that on tech stuff sometimes that might
Speaker 1: be a great idea. Yeah, sure, since we've got some
Speaker 1: of the research right here, that would be a great
Speaker 1: foundation for a tech stuff episode. But I did want
Speaker 1: to mention a few of the particularly like key or
Speaker 1: or interesting stories from the very beginning days of the
Speaker 1: development of this kind of stuff. Cool. So, as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, the first electrical mechanical five fingered
Speaker 1: hand is from nineteen six two. I bet that was
Speaker 1: a horror. It wasn't a full robot it and it
Speaker 1: actually it was so beautifully designed that it wasn't such
Speaker 1: a horror as you would imagine. Yeah, it was intended
Speaker 1: to to be a prosthesis. And it's called the bell
Speaker 1: Grade Hand. It was designed by a biomedical engineer by
Speaker 1: the name of Rachael Tomovich and an electrical engineer by
Speaker 1: the name of Mio Drug at the University of Belgrade.
Speaker 1: He's the name the Belgrade Hand. And I'm really hope
Speaker 1: that I'm not. I looked up the pronunciation of these names,
Speaker 1: but I don't know Serbian, so I might still be
Speaker 1: totally mangling them. It's way better than any time I
Speaker 1: ever say anyone's name in whatever language. So I think,
Speaker 1: I think you have acquitted yourself with honor. Excellent. Um,
Speaker 1: there's actually a lot of really beautiful images of their
Speaker 1: design because a couple of years back, and artist by
Speaker 1: the name of another one, okay, Alexandra Demonovich. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: she she built a digital model of the Belgrade Hand
Speaker 1: and then casted a whole bunch of copies for a
Speaker 1: gallery show she did called The Future was at her
Speaker 1: finger tips anyway, the Belgrade hand had five touch sensitive
Speaker 1: fingers that were controlled by a single motor, so that
Speaker 1: when any fingerpad came into contact with an object, all
Speaker 1: the fingers closed until the pressure on each pad was
Speaker 1: was just about equal, thereby hypothetically gripping the object. Interesting, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but not a robot. It was, you know, a reactionary
Speaker 1: machine piece. Um that. The first truly like programmable hand
Speaker 1: was a three finger device created in three in a
Speaker 1: collaboration by Stanford University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thus
Speaker 1: called the Stanford JPL hand. Uh. The lead designer was
Speaker 1: this fascinating guy, Jay Kenneth Salisbury Jr. Who's a mechanical
Speaker 1: engineer who specializes in both computer science and surgical anatomy,
Speaker 1: which diverse interests. I know, I love it, um and
Speaker 1: and the Stanford JPL hand had three joints on each
Speaker 1: finger for nine total degrees of freedom with its again
Speaker 1: like kind of like nightcrawler hands, and and its motions
Speaker 1: were controlled by electric motors that were attached to tendons
Speaker 1: within the fingers. But perhaps the most famous device from
Speaker 1: this general era was created in five. It was a
Speaker 1: four fingered hand from the University of Utah and m
Speaker 1: I T. That's called the Utah m I T Hand,
Speaker 1: and each finger on it had four joints for a
Speaker 1: total of sixteen degrees of freedom, and its motions were
Speaker 1: were pneumatically driven. Wait, four joints, that's more than real
Speaker 1: fingers have, right, Yeah, it is, isn't it to yea more? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So it looks and only are we gesturing with her
Speaker 1: hands were referring to them staring at let me physically
Speaker 1: count the joints on my hand. Um. Usually it's only
Speaker 1: on the weekends when I'm just staring at my hands.
Speaker 1: But today I feel like we're really really making progress
Speaker 1: toward that. Uh and so. So the fingers were sort
Speaker 1: of like long and spidery. It actually reminds me of
Speaker 1: like a skeletal version of of like Mr Burns hands
Speaker 1: on The Simpsons, the three fingers and the thumb and
Speaker 1: so hull um. The the kind of most advanced of
Speaker 1: the bunch was released in nineteen eighty eight or or
Speaker 1: debuted in because there were a couple of different models
Speaker 1: of it out of the University of Southern California and
Speaker 1: the University of Novi. Sad At Belgrade and that's called
Speaker 1: the Belgrade USC hand. It's based on the design of
Speaker 1: that original nineteen sixties Belgrade hand. Um So, it had
Speaker 1: a rotating thumb with two joints, and fingers with three
Speaker 1: joints each for a total of fifteen degrees of freedom.
Speaker 1: And unlike these these previous examples, the joints were not
Speaker 1: independently controlled. They kind of took que from that Belgrade
Speaker 1: hand and also from actual human fingers because if you,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can independently move each finger, but all
Speaker 1: of the joints on each finger are kind of attached
Speaker 1: to each other, I mean, movement wise. So, um so,
Speaker 1: if if if a knuckle joint moved on this spell
Speaker 1: Grade USC hand, it would trigger the other joints on
Speaker 1: that finger to move as well. Right to sort of
Speaker 1: curl in. Yeah, Like again we're looking at her hands
Speaker 1: and playing with them. Well you know, it's just try
Speaker 1: to just curl in your pinky. I can't do that.
Speaker 1: I can't do your other finger comes with it, not
Speaker 1: at all like that. That's a that's a like I'm point,
Speaker 1: I'm showing something to people who can't even see this.
Speaker 1: It's just Joe and Lauren to get Yeah, when I curl,
Speaker 1: When I curl in my pinky, my my ring finger
Speaker 1: is almost as curled in, and then my other two
Speaker 1: fingers curling as well. For me, because I can't, Lauren
Speaker 1: is able to turn her pinky's in much more capably.
Speaker 1: Just I was able to just pull my pinky in
Speaker 1: after I forced it down with my other hand. That's cheating, cheating,
Speaker 1: but but there are some robot hands that can do that,
Speaker 1: where each finger can independently move with that full freedom.
Speaker 1: This approach, however, was more like a human hand, and
Speaker 1: that you had those connections between the various fingers right right,
Speaker 1: So it's a little bit more naturalistic and probably energy
Speaker 1: savings as a result. Interesting. And um, and these these
Speaker 1: few that I've just mentioned, we're kind of the standards
Speaker 1: that that everyone referred to for for a number of years. Um,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really until the late nineties that a whole
Speaker 1: slew of research projects involving robotic hands started going into development. Again,
Speaker 1: you know, the tech was kind of booming at that time,
Speaker 1: and also the the size and cost of computers was
Speaker 1: really starting to actively shrink, right, yeah, right, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: And so of course research has continued. I know one
Speaker 1: private company that has been a big name in in
Speaker 1: robotic hands or at least five fingered robotic hands in
Speaker 1: the past decade or so has been the Shadow Robot
Speaker 1: company out of London. Doesn't sound terrifying at all, right,
Speaker 1: but they've yeah, they've got this product called the Shadow
Speaker 1: Dexterous Hand. And when I when I was looking at
Speaker 1: a research that was ongoing at like university labs with
Speaker 1: the robotic hands, a lot of them seemed to be
Speaker 1: basing their models off of the Shadow Hand, like making
Speaker 1: modifications to it and stuff. Right, the Shadow Hand itself
Speaker 1: is commercially available, so you can buy one. They do
Speaker 1: not say how much it costs. I wonder why not
Speaker 1: you send an inquiry and find out, uh general rule
Speaker 1: of thumb if you have to ask, it's too much
Speaker 1: for you to pay. But but but it is. It
Speaker 1: is a really fascinating piece of technology. I know a
Speaker 1: shadow now. I don't know exactly how much their product
Speaker 1: came through in the final version, but they were involved
Speaker 1: in the creation of the Moley Chef robot right right,
Speaker 1: which is the one about those disembodied hands to make
Speaker 1: the crab bisk that Lauren was talking about. Earlier. Yea um,
Speaker 1: so it's got hands reaching around the stoves, you know,
Speaker 1: adding ingredients and stirring stuff. And we know that the
Speaker 1: Shadow Robot company had something to do with contributing technolo
Speaker 1: lergy to that, right, So the hand that they make,
Speaker 1: the stexterous hand, has twenty degrees of freedom, so similar
Speaker 1: to a human hand. Twenty four joints total, and the
Speaker 1: fingers and thumb are all capable of motion. And it
Speaker 1: can also flex its palm similar to what our hands
Speaker 1: do near the little finger when we close our fists.
Speaker 1: So when you close your fist, you see that there's
Speaker 1: a little bit of a fold right below your your
Speaker 1: pinky that this hand also does that. So it's not
Speaker 1: just an independent joint where the pinky just folds down
Speaker 1: over the palm of the hand. The palm itself, palm
Speaker 1: doesn't move at all exactly. So it has a hundred
Speaker 1: twenty nine sensors, so pretty advanced, right. It provides telemetry
Speaker 1: data and it makes the hand useful for developing manipulation
Speaker 1: control systems. So you might end up getting a hand
Speaker 1: like this if you are actually working on the back
Speaker 1: end uh software side of things to control the hardware
Speaker 1: Each joint also has absolute position sensing, and each actuator
Speaker 1: has force sensing. That way, you can get really specific
Speaker 1: with the way the robotic can handles whatever objects you're
Speaker 1: planning on making it handle. The fingertips have other sensors
Speaker 1: in them as well that can sense tactile uh sensations
Speaker 1: in other words, rough versus smooth, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Also temperature, so it knows if something is hot or cold. Uh.
Speaker 1: I mean again, these are things that we take for
Speaker 1: granted as human beings, but robots don't just automatically know that.
Speaker 1: If a robot hasn't been programmed to sense temperature and
Speaker 1: react to it in some way, if you had a
Speaker 1: robotic hand and it came into contact with something too
Speaker 1: hot for the robotic hand to stand up to for
Speaker 1: any length of time, it would just get destroyed. It
Speaker 1: would be melted or burn. So uh, it's a very
Speaker 1: clever thing that they added. Also, it can detect current
Speaker 1: and voltage um so you can have it. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you're working with electronic systems and being able to detect,
Speaker 1: you know, whether or not current is flowing, something that
Speaker 1: you don't mind a robot doing, but you probably mind
Speaker 1: if a person is doing it. If you're a decent person,
Speaker 1: you mind if a person is doing it, because you're
Speaker 1: depending on the amount of voltage and current, you might
Speaker 1: have some pretty big safety issues on your hands. Um
Speaker 1: And so really a cool piece of technology. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Joe, you wrote the script for the video
Speaker 1: episode that we did about robotic hands, which and I
Speaker 1: don't know when this podcast goes live. I have no
Speaker 1: idea if that video will have published yet or not,
Speaker 1: because I don't know what the publication scheduled for our
Speaker 1: videos are, so you might be getting a preview right now.
Speaker 1: But it was really neat to look into this and
Speaker 1: see the design and see how it moves, um and
Speaker 1: I was really impressed by it. One other thing I
Speaker 1: want to add is you might think, all right, so
Speaker 1: what are these robotic hands for. I mean, they're not
Speaker 1: attached to a robot that's disembodied hand. So some of
Speaker 1: it is tell operation that idea of being able to
Speaker 1: control a robotic hand with a human controller to operate
Speaker 1: something that you might not want to be in the
Speaker 1: area for, like you're handling toxic material reels, for example.
Speaker 1: But another one is you could actually use this to
Speaker 1: outfit a robot with these robotic hands. So if your
Speaker 1: robot has big old hooks at the end of its
Speaker 1: arms and you're like, finally the hands have come in,
Speaker 1: you can you can rip the hooks out, dump the
Speaker 1: hands on. Congratulations clamps. You're getting some fingers, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the shadow hand, like we said, has been involved
Speaker 1: in like it's been used as a model for some
Speaker 1: university research. And one university that I have seen plenty
Speaker 1: of interesting robotic hand research associated with is the University
Speaker 1: of Washington UH and a couple of researchers who have
Speaker 1: been associated with the University of Washington. Earlier this year,
Speaker 1: there was a cool piece in the I Triple A
Speaker 1: Spectrum about them creating this bio memetic hand that was
Speaker 1: trying to take the five fingered hand approach to make
Speaker 1: it more like the skeletal and muscular structure of a
Speaker 1: real human hand. And they went to great lengths to
Speaker 1: make sure that they could do that is super cool.
Speaker 1: The way they did also, depending on your point of view,
Speaker 1: maybe a little creepy. So so you know, our our
Speaker 1: normal robotic hands, which is a weird sentence the way
Speaker 1: to start a sentence, but but your traditional robotic hand
Speaker 1: it's it's trying to mimic what a human hand can do,
Speaker 1: and might be somewhat based upon the structure of a
Speaker 1: human hand, but we have to take a lot of liberties, right,
Speaker 1: like using hinges or gimbals in order to replicate a joint,
Speaker 1: for example, and it's not gonna have bones like your hand, right,
Speaker 1: And also might mean that the the motion that you
Speaker 1: get out of such a hand is not truly representative
Speaker 1: of what a human hand does, or what it can
Speaker 1: do or what it cannot do. And that becomes important
Speaker 1: when you want a robot to be able to interact
Speaker 1: with our human world, right, you want the robot to
Speaker 1: be able to do essentially the same sort of things
Speaker 1: a human can do and avoid the stuff that humans
Speaker 1: can't do because it's irrelevant within the hum in the
Speaker 1: world unless it's something that ends up being useful. Right.
Speaker 1: So they decided that instead of just using these hinges
Speaker 1: and gimbals, they wanted to take a different approach. So
Speaker 1: they took a dead person's hand, a cadaver, a skeleton
Speaker 1: from a cadaver, actually a skeletal hand, and then they
Speaker 1: scanned it with a laser scanner. So they got a
Speaker 1: really accurate scan of the bones in a human hand,
Speaker 1: and then they use the three D printer to replicate
Speaker 1: that by printing out artificial bones. Now, this meant that
Speaker 1: the joints where the finger the finger segments all meet together,
Speaker 1: they are exactly the way human joints are. So it
Speaker 1: doesn't have the mechanical element of like a hinge or
Speaker 1: a gimbal, like a screw or something like that. You
Speaker 1: actually need ligaments, yeah, because it's otherwise it's just a
Speaker 1: ball and socket correct, right yeah yeah, just if yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll just fall apart. It won't won't do anything. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they use artificial ligaments. Uh. They also talked
Speaker 1: about it was particularly full for the thumbs because the
Speaker 1: thumb joints are are a little more advanced in a
Speaker 1: way you can you could say, then the finger joints
Speaker 1: are the base of the thumb. You can do a
Speaker 1: lot more motion than just bending it down. Again, we're
Speaker 1: looking at our hands and playing with them. This is great.
Speaker 1: I can't wait till we do the episode on feet
Speaker 1: and then we're all like this was a terrible idea.
Speaker 1: So uh, they nobody cares. Just wait, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: a request now. So the muscles, though the muscles in
Speaker 1: the hand are simulated by ten dyna mixel servos and
Speaker 1: so they're using uh, mechanical servos to pull uh, the
Speaker 1: the cables that are replicating the muscles tendons. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that controls whether the fingers are open or closed and
Speaker 1: the various motions of the hand. Uh. And they actually
Speaker 1: route the cable in a way that is similar to
Speaker 1: the carpal tunnel of your your wrist and hands, so
Speaker 1: that maybe this robotic can could get carbal tunnel syndrome. Well,
Speaker 1: you know if it, if it actually worked long enough,
Speaker 1: then you would imagine that those cables would eventually wear
Speaker 1: out and so you would have to do some surgery
Speaker 1: on it. I doubt it would have to wear a
Speaker 1: brace afterward, but you might uns it to feel pain,
Speaker 1: right yeah, which I mean, come on, that's got to
Speaker 1: be on the list. But that's a funny thing to
Speaker 1: point out because it does highlights another possible use for
Speaker 1: an extremely accurate replication of a human hand with a robot,
Speaker 1: which would be hands used for medical research. Yes, like
Speaker 1: if you wanted to use a robotic hand in some
Speaker 1: kind of futuristic setting, maybe as a scaffolding for regrowing
Speaker 1: regenerative tissue, or as a or as a model for
Speaker 1: replacing a human hand like Luke Skywalker and Empire strikes
Speaker 1: by giving somebody a fully functional robotic hand. Now, we
Speaker 1: we have some hand prostheses today that are sort of
Speaker 1: referred to as robotic hands, but they're not quite as
Speaker 1: functional as a real hand would be, right, And and
Speaker 1: they in fact have said that that was their intent
Speaker 1: to create a platform that could be used in such
Speaker 1: a way. Also, you can control this hand using a Waldo.
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to bring that in because it's
Speaker 1: one of those terms that you've probably heard if you've
Speaker 1: ever worked with puppetry. Uh, the puppeteers who are using
Speaker 1: a digital electronic puppets often use a Waldo to control them. Essentially,
Speaker 1: that's a remote manipulator. It's named after a character from
Speaker 1: a short story from a Robert d. Heinland piece, Waldo,
Speaker 1: who the guy named Waldo creates a device that does
Speaker 1: this thing. So when people finally did create a device
Speaker 1: that does this thing, they named it after the fictional one.
Speaker 1: And so it allows for Tela operation. So in puppetry,
Speaker 1: this would allow you to do something like move Hoggle's
Speaker 1: mouth in labyrinth, so that the the actor inside the
Speaker 1: hoggle suit isn't also having to manipulate some other control
Speaker 1: to make the mouth move that's actually being controlled by
Speaker 1: a puppeteer off screen. In this case, you would be
Speaker 1: wearing a essentially like a glow with sensors on it,
Speaker 1: so when you started moving your fingers, it would detect
Speaker 1: the motions and then translate that into commands that the
Speaker 1: robotic hand would follow, and it would mimic the motions
Speaker 1: that you make with your hand with just a slight delay.
Speaker 1: So it's a little it's a little eerie to watch,
Speaker 1: but also really cool. Yeah, So we mentioned that that
Speaker 1: research was associated with the University of Washington, but there's
Speaker 1: some more that we want to point to. Uh. For example,
Speaker 1: there was one group of researchers who in May of sixteen,
Speaker 1: they're they're presenting a conference present I think the presentation
Speaker 1: hasn't actually happened yet on the day we're recording this,
Speaker 1: but the paper has been released online presenting a conference
Speaker 1: paper called Optimal Control with Learned Local Models Application to
Speaker 1: Dexterous Manipulation. And this is research about machine learning for
Speaker 1: programming robotic hands. Now they're working off of a sort
Speaker 1: of modified shadow hand model that they came up with
Speaker 1: actually detailed this in an earlier conference present station paper.
Speaker 1: So in the earlier paper, they bought a shadow hand
Speaker 1: robotic hand to use for testing advanced control schemes that
Speaker 1: they were trying to come up with with in their
Speaker 1: robotic hand movement laboratory laboratory. But they did some testing
Speaker 1: and they found that the actuation wasn't fast enough for
Speaker 1: the dexterous object manipulation they were going for. So in
Speaker 1: this first paper they described essentially a pneumatic actuation system
Speaker 1: to improve the design to make it faster, and they
Speaker 1: emphasized that their goal was not to build new hardware
Speaker 1: for its own sake, but sort of in furtherance of
Speaker 1: designing newer, better control schemes for robotic hands. Uh so,
Speaker 1: what's the deal with the control schemes. Well, this team
Speaker 1: of engineers and computer scientists from University of Washington, a
Speaker 1: couple of a couple of the same as that previous paper.
Speaker 1: They designed a system for robotic manipulation that can learn
Speaker 1: tricks of dexterity from experience. And that was that paper
Speaker 1: title I mentioned, So that the lead author, Vikesh Kumar.
Speaker 1: He's a doctoral student at the University of Washington studying
Speaker 1: computer science and engineering uh and he he explained the
Speaker 1: context for his paper by saying, quote, hand manipulation is
Speaker 1: one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve.
Speaker 1: A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms, but
Speaker 1: the hand is as simple as a suction cup or
Speaker 1: maybe a claw or a gripper, so they're on our
Speaker 1: frequency clause grippers, yea, not clamps, but there may be
Speaker 1: wisdom and a clamp, but it can't twirl a baton.
Speaker 1: Uh Now. So the goal was to advance a control
Speaker 1: scheme to create dextrous movements for a pneumatically actuated so
Speaker 1: that's pneumatic movements, you know, air air pressure. Uh. Tendon
Speaker 1: driven twenty four degree of freedom robotic hand. So this
Speaker 1: is building off hardware ideas that they established in the
Speaker 1: previous research. And this this thing would have forty tendons,
Speaker 1: twenty four joints, and more than a hundred and thirty censers.
Speaker 1: Because even if you have a great robotic hand with
Speaker 1: vast nimble hardware and feedback sensors and all that stuff,
Speaker 1: how does it know what to do? Right? Think about
Speaker 1: the way you you reach out with your hand and
Speaker 1: pick up a grape and then toss the grape into
Speaker 1: your mouth. If you can do that, can you guys
Speaker 1: do that? I would probably hit myself in the eyeball.
Speaker 1: I practice sometimes, and it's it's harder than it looks.
Speaker 1: They make it look easy in the cartoons. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it's not just one motion there. There is a series
Speaker 1: of probably hundreds of individual muscle contractions and micromotions to
Speaker 1: do this one task that seems really fluid and simple
Speaker 1: at the micro at the macro level. But imagine if
Speaker 1: you're programming a robot hand to do the same thing.
Speaker 1: Would you literally want to have to figure out how
Speaker 1: to explicitly program what every single muscle equivalent actuator has
Speaker 1: to do at every moment in this action. I wouldn't. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the authors on the paper, the senior
Speaker 1: author and lab director Imo Todorov. He was quoted in
Speaker 1: a University of Washington press release explaining this. So he says, quote,
Speaker 1: usually people look at motion and try to determine what
Speaker 1: exactly needs to happen. The pinky needs to move that way.
Speaker 1: So we'll put some rules in and try it and
Speaker 1: if something doesn't work, oh, the middle finger moved too
Speaker 1: much and the pin tilted, will try another rule. So
Speaker 1: he compares many robotic manipulation systems essentially to an animated film.
Speaker 1: And I like this comparison because it looks great, But
Speaker 1: that's because it's been meticulously specified by programmers in advance.
Speaker 1: And this system, on the other hand, the one they're
Speaker 1: coming up with and describing in this new paper, is
Speaker 1: more independent, which is important if you want a generalist
Speaker 1: robot that can interact within a human environment. Obviously you
Speaker 1: don't want to have to program every single conceivable interaction
Speaker 1: this robot might have, because you know you're never going
Speaker 1: to be able to do that. Yeah, you can't. It's
Speaker 1: it's like that would be an exhausting choosier and adventure.
Speaker 1: It could. It could be one where you send the
Speaker 1: robot out and you're like, guys, we did great work today.
Speaker 1: Did anyone remember what to tell the robot to do
Speaker 1: if it ever picks up a knife? Get it back? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean it seems to me that if we want
Speaker 1: to have good generalist robots with like a humanoid range
Speaker 1: of hand motions, we're gonna have to go to the
Speaker 1: machine learning round. I have a hard time imagining how
Speaker 1: all of the motions of such a machine could be
Speaker 1: explicitly programmed. That seems to me almost like trying to
Speaker 1: imagine a natural language chatbot that has all of its
Speaker 1: conversation explicitly programmed. It's just ridiculous. You couldn't do it. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's probably not quite on that level, but seems close.
Speaker 1: But anyway, So what did they do well? The University
Speaker 1: of Washington team has a computer simulation of the hand
Speaker 1: that can analyze its movements in real time and this
Speaker 1: can help teach the robot hand how to improve its
Speaker 1: motions through machine learning. That their term is reinforcement learning
Speaker 1: or r L UH and in the paper they describe
Speaker 1: their r L algorithm. It is vastly complex and I
Speaker 1: don't understand a bit of it, but it's online if
Speaker 1: you want to go check it out yourself. But they
Speaker 1: used this optimized control strategies for the hand, uh and
Speaker 1: to use it to reach target poses and to manipulate
Speaker 1: a cylindrical object object. And Jonathan, what is that cylindrical object?
Speaker 1: It's a plastic two filled with coffee beans. Not sure
Speaker 1: why they picked full of coffee beans. But I like it.
Speaker 1: They're probably on hand to speak. I don't think they
Speaker 1: just I didn't find anywhere in the paper where they
Speaker 1: described why coffee beans. Unless I missed it, I can't
Speaker 1: put my finger on it. Yeah, but anyway, apparently the
Speaker 1: very first um jamming transition ball was also a balloon
Speaker 1: filled with ground coffee. Wow. I think it's just scientists
Speaker 1: like coffee. Oh yeah, they just have a lot on me.
Speaker 1: There's got to be a study on it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a video demonstration they put online where they gave
Speaker 1: the robot a task and what it is is twirling
Speaker 1: in elongated tube of coffee beans in its hand, and
Speaker 1: it's using machine learning algorithms to work in steps to
Speaker 1: slowly teach itself how to rotate this object in its palm.
Speaker 1: So it sort of starts with it laying across the
Speaker 1: palm and it's trying to move its fingers to twist
Speaker 1: it out like a baton right that it's handing off
Speaker 1: to you. And I watched this video, and I gotta
Speaker 1: be honest with you, when it got to the point
Speaker 1: where it reached the success rate, I wasn't entirely sure.
Speaker 1: At what point did we pass the fail. But I
Speaker 1: will say that it makes sense that this is a
Speaker 1: complicated because you think about it's a tube that's filled
Speaker 1: with it's not packed. It's not completely packed with so
Speaker 1: stuff from shifts to the weight shifts exactly. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it is trickier than what it sounds like upon when
Speaker 1: you first hear it. Right. Well, I mean it seems
Speaker 1: easy for you because it's intuitive because you've already done that,
Speaker 1: not machine learning, but your equivalent, the bio learning throughout
Speaker 1: throughout your early years, spinning how to manipulate object. I've
Speaker 1: been twirling tubes of coffee beans for decades. But if
Speaker 1: you watch a toddler try to manipulate object, it's hilarious
Speaker 1: with their hands. Yeah, yeah, they'll drop stuff and they
Speaker 1: don't know how to do it right. Watching babies trying
Speaker 1: to feed themselves, they can't operate the objects yet, the
Speaker 1: fork or anything. Like. I feel the same way every
Speaker 1: time I try to eat a salad because like, the
Speaker 1: leaves are all different sizes and I just I can't.
Speaker 1: I cannot put them in my face. Yeah, it's I'm
Speaker 1: terrible at human ng. Yeah, I got it. Um, I
Speaker 1: understand entirely. You must be getting bad salads. I they're
Speaker 1: great salads. They're just they're just randomly sized just so
Speaker 1: you get that wedge salad. You just look at your like,
Speaker 1: my arch nemesis, we meet again at any rate. I
Speaker 1: I do find it really fascinating that they're focusing on
Speaker 1: pneumatics for for this research, as opposed to the electrical
Speaker 1: motors as actuators, which which I think have been more
Speaker 1: so the standard, like the historically speaking, it was an outlier,
Speaker 1: a couple of outliers that were neeumatic, and so's it's
Speaker 1: cool that that technology is coming around again. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: you watch these hands go through all their degrees of motion,
Speaker 1: like doing all the different joint movements as fast as
Speaker 1: they can, it's pretty funny. It's like, uh, just fingers
Speaker 1: slamming back and forth, and yeah, you hear a lot
Speaker 1: of clacking. Yeah, well, wouldn't that be a great scene
Speaker 1: in a horror movie like this, So there's a there's
Speaker 1: a mad robot with humanoid hands coming for you, you
Speaker 1: just hear the clacking fingers clacking up and down, or
Speaker 1: or another great scene you see, uh, what you had
Speaker 1: presumed to be a human character this whole time, just
Speaker 1: lift up their hand and then go through that sequence
Speaker 1: super fast and you're like, all right, that's not a person.
Speaker 1: No human can do that. So one last thing about
Speaker 1: this method that they came up with in the hand
Speaker 1: that they're using is that it's expensive at this point.
Speaker 1: So it's not cost effective for their method to be uh,
Speaker 1: sort of exported for industrial use or something. Right now,
Speaker 1: it's a research model, So what they're saying is it's
Speaker 1: to improve core robotics principles. And so what they're trying
Speaker 1: to do is come up with control schemes, systems for
Speaker 1: designing control four hands of this kind, and hopefully they're
Speaker 1: researching conjunction with other types of research along these lines
Speaker 1: going on around the around the world, can help sort
Speaker 1: of build up a robotic control scheme consensus that will
Speaker 1: allow us to have better, smarter control of objects even
Speaker 1: with the good hardware we have today. Yeah, so not
Speaker 1: even with that applying to the good hardware we have today.
Speaker 1: So we can think of it as like primary research
Speaker 1: in that field as opposed to heading toward a finished product,
Speaker 1: which it's still really interesting and uh, and we're in
Speaker 1: the early days. I'm excited to see where that goes.
Speaker 1: I mean, think about some of the applications we could
Speaker 1: put a really advanced robotic hand toward. Right now, there's
Speaker 1: the obvious one of robotic prosthetics, which we've seen some of,
Speaker 1: like we've got the Luke arm for example. We've seen
Speaker 1: some some pretty impressive improvements in that space, but we're
Speaker 1: still lagging well behind what what humans have evolved into
Speaker 1: over those millions of years. But that's clearly one use
Speaker 1: case for robotic hands as we get them more uh well,
Speaker 1: as they become more similar to the ones that we have.
Speaker 1: But there are other ones we could use too. I mean,
Speaker 1: like you you mentioned the using it actually not to
Speaker 1: replace a hand, but perhaps as a platform upon which
Speaker 1: you could study and research and develop regenerative medical procedures. Yeah. Sure,
Speaker 1: regenerative tissues. I mean that's going to be I think
Speaker 1: a burgeoning field in future years. Yeah, I think it'll
Speaker 1: be really interesting to see, uh where this goes, right,
Speaker 1: whether or not we do see more generalist robots enter
Speaker 1: into the scene, because, as we pointed out, the hands
Speaker 1: are just one aspect of how tricky it is to
Speaker 1: design a robot that is capable of moving through the
Speaker 1: human world as a depth. As we do well let's
Speaker 1: be clear, there is absolutely not even close to such
Speaker 1: a thing as a good generalist robot today. It doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: So it may very well be that within our lifetimes
Speaker 1: we don't really see a strong generalist robot. It maybe
Speaker 1: that we see a lot of specialized robots like the Roomba,
Speaker 1: things that were designed to to do specific jobs and
Speaker 1: nothing else. And uh, it may be that that's just
Speaker 1: the status quo for several decades. Then again, I wonder
Speaker 1: if you might have a specialist robot that may still
Speaker 1: need humanoid hands. For example, if let's say we we
Speaker 1: fully commit to the chef robot like Moley, you know,
Speaker 1: with hands doing stuff all over the kitchen, and we say, now,
Speaker 1: it's not just adding ingredients and stirring, it's also doing
Speaker 1: all the chopping and the peeling and the washing, and
Speaker 1: it's got to be able to handle all our foods,
Speaker 1: handle all the kitchen utensils. In that case, I would think, well, maybe,
Speaker 1: even though this is to some degree a specialist robot,
Speaker 1: it needs humanoid hands, right, Or if you were going
Speaker 1: to make a robot to change baby stipers, sure, I
Speaker 1: guess so. I like that. I like that that's the
Speaker 1: example you went with as opposed to something I'm seeing
Speaker 1: in our notes right now for the first time robuts
Speaker 1: designed for choking and strangling. Joe, I just put that
Speaker 1: in there for a laugh. Okay, that's fair, all right,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we we we definitely think that the the work,
Speaker 1: the advancement. That's fair. That's fair. So if you have
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