Elon Musk Wrangles With the Robot Hand

We now have boxing robots, however can they screw in a nail?

Designing a helpful human hand for humanoids is acknowledged as one of many harder engineering challenges inside the robotics industry.

Elon Musk, the person who needs to place knowledge facilities in house and colonize Mars, may also admit that.

“The palms and arms and the effective motor expertise are extremely troublesome to get proper,” Musk stated in a digital interview with Tesla Homeowners of Silicon Valley. “Like shockingly troublesome.”

Musk cited totally different fundamental expertise, comparable to screwing a nail into a bit of wooden or opening a jar of pickles, that he stated are a lot tougher to copy by means of robotic palms as a result of they require the appropriate utility of drive, precision, and sensors.

“There is no hand design that I’ve seen, not even type of a demo that does that,” Musk stated of screwdriving a self-tapping screw into wooden. “However that is what we’re attempting to realize with Optimus.”

There is no normal for a way finest to design a human hand for robots able to dexterous manipulation. Design decisions can embody the place to position the motors — instantly within the palms or inside the arms — and which sensors are acceptable for dependable manipulation.

These decisions additionally include tradeoffs. Inserting motors within the hand means smaller motors which may be extra susceptible to breakage and produce much less drive. Musk pointed to the problem of realizing the place to place the sensors.

“In the event you put them too near the floor, they’ll get broken,” he stated. “And the contact sensors — can they elastically deform like our fingers? Properly, really, it is sort of onerous to get contact sensors that elastically deform and may deal with excessive cycle life and will not simply break after a number of thousand cycles.”

Some robotics corporations have opted to not mimic the human hand, whereas others proceed to sort out the issue.

1X, the Palo Alto-based humanoid maker, informed Enterprise Insider’s Rya Jetha earlier this yr that it has achieved “the closest hand to human-level dexterity” with its NEO robot, creating a hand with 25 levels of freedom and waterproofing.