Elon Musk wrangles with the robot hand

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

Designing a helpful individual hand for humanoids is recognized as among the additional difficult engineering challenges inside the robotics industry.

Elon Musk, the man who wants to put data centers in area and colonize Mars, can additionally acknowledge that.

"The hands and arms and the fine motor skills are incredibly difficult to get right," Musk stated in a virtual discussion alongside Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley. "Like shockingly difficult."

Musk cited distinct essential skills, specified as screwing a nail into a part of timber or beginning a jar of pickles, that he stated are much harder to replicate through robot hands since they necessitate the correct use of force, precision, and sensors.

"There's no hand scheme that I've seen, not equal kind of a demo that does that," Musk stated of screwdriving a self-tapping screw into wood. "But that's what we're trying to accomplish alongside Optimus."

There's no norm for how finest to scheme a individual hand for robots capable of dexterous manipulation. Design choices can contain anywhere to location the motors — immediately in the hands or inside the arms — and which sensors are suitable for dependable manipulation.

Those choices additionally arrive alongside tradeoffs. Placing motors in the hand method smaller motors that may be additional prone to breakage and create small force. Musk pointed to the difficulty of knowing anywhere to put the sensors.

"If you put them too near to the surface, they're going to get damaged," he said. "And the contact sensors — can they elastically deform akin our fingers? Well, actually, it's benevolent of difficult to get contact sensors that elastically deform and can grip elevated sequence existence and won't fair interrupt following a few thousand cycles."

Some robotics companies have opted not to mimic the individual hand, during others continue to tackle the problem.

1X, the Palo Alto-based humanoid maker, told Business Insider's Rya Jetha before this twelvemonth that it has achieved "the closest hand to human-level dexterity" alongside its NEO robot, evolving a hand alongside 25 degrees of liberty and waterproofing.