The Robotic Dexterity Deadlock

A humanoid human will fall over too if pushed into a sufficiently awkward corner. It’s a fundamental problem with things that aren’t statically stable and need active stabilization.

I think it’s less about tools and more about the spaces that humans operate in.

You don’t need a human-like hand to hold a tool made for humans. As an extreme example, you can make a robot operate a power drill with strap to hold it and a servo with a small bit of wood to operate the trigger mechanism.

But for a robot operating in a space made for humans there certainly are some physical requirements which are based on the human form: maximum volume and clearances, stairs, fragile fixtures that can’t be operated with too much force, etc.

Ever walk through some over-crowded antique shop where you need to twist and lean your body to avoid knocking into thing?

Nothing scarier than a Vercel bill.

Even the title follows a common LLM pattern (The X Problem/Issue/etc).

That's a nice piece of motor engineering. It's well known that high ratio gearboxes for robots are a headache. Back driveability doesn't work, and tiny teeth are fragile. Comments on this go all the way back to Feynman writing about his time spent engineering automatic gunnery aiming systems in WWII.

This new discovery is that gearbox problems mess up a machine learning system. It's trying to track gearbox noise and is using up all its learning capacity on that. This discovery means that robotics people can tap machine learning funding for motor and gearbox development. Robotics labs used to be really low-budget operations. No longer.

What you really want is a direct drive motor, but those have to be large-diameter. They can be flat; that's a pancake motor. That's too large for fingers. So their compromise moves partly in that direction; the rotor is flatter, torques are higher, speeds are slower, and gearbox ratios are lower. As they point out, reflected inertia is the square of the gear ratio, because the gear ratio gets you both going out and coming back. So this is a bigger than linear win.

Good back-drivabiilty means much less risk of gear breakage on overload. Some of the academic designs, such as harmonic drives and series elastic actuators, have huge gear ratios in a small space. That's OK for prototypes but not production. As I've mentioned before, "you cannot strip the teeth of a magnetic field", a line from a GE electric locomotive salesman around 1900. If an overload forces a motor backwards, nothing breaks.

Would have been nice to hear more about the motor design. That's the real achievement here. There are CAD tools which understand electromagnetic fields now, so strange motor geometries are not as much of a trial and error and experience process as it once was. It's also respectable for an EE to work on rotating machinery again. That field matured around the 1960s, and until computers took over motor control, didn't change much.