Elon Musk is all over the place in today’s news, but now he’s teamed up with Silicon Valley finance Sam Altman to help teach robotic hands human functions. I’d give him a high-five, but I’m sure the robot could do that for me. The development is not in a brand new design in robotic hands, but research breakthroughs have found a way to autonomously teach the robot hands simple human tasks.
The OpenAI development technology taught a pre-built hand to fiddle and rotate with a child’s playing block through its fingers. The metal appendages use sliding and finger gaiting in order to process the letters on the block so it can select the correct letter it is being asked to find. Now that this has been achieved, the next step is for more complicated human tasks to be tackled, such as picking up a block if its dropped.
The challenges that come with this type of technology is a simulation must be created before it is transferred to the real world. Otherwise, the robotic hand will drop the block, yet continue its current behavior without realizing it needs to pick up the block.
If Elon Musk is switching to robotics software from creating more Teslas, it would be nice to know now so I can take my name off the Model 3 waiting list.
