Anyone tried fully soft robotic fingers on a rigid humanoid platform?

[jonathan.rao1]

This matches something I went through recently. A lot of the manipulation shown in production demos still leans heavily on teleoperation, particularly for anything involving fine force control or novel objects - autonomous grasp success rates on genuinely unstructured, previously-unseen clutter are still well below what teleoperation can achieve.

[nicole57]

From hands-on experience, In-hand reorientation (repositioning a grasped object without setting it down) is one of the more advanced manipulation skills, requiring either a highly dexterous hand with enough DoF or clever use of gravity and controlled slipping - it's an active research area rather than a solved problem. Figure's fourth-generation Dexterous Hand (on Figure 02/03) reportedly offers 16 degrees of freedom per hand with sensors integrated into each finger, aimed at fine force control tasks like handling small electronic components without crushing them.

[barbara.jones]

@nicole57 Can I ask a dumb follow-up - Payload-to-hand-weight ratio varies a lot across current dexterous hands, and it's a meaningful tradeoff - more DoF and finer sensing generally means more actuators and mass in the hand itself, which eats into the arm's usable payload budget.

[sarah.santos3]

@barbara.jones Pretty much this. One thing to add: Vision-based grasp confidence estimation (predicting success before attempting a grasp) and tactile-based confirmation (confirming after contact) are complementary rather than competing - vision helps you choose a grasp, tactile tells you if it actually worked.

[carol.robinson]

Ran into exactly this myself. Object occlusion by the robot's own hand during the final approach to a grasp is a common and annoying perception problem - the closer the hand gets to a good grasp position, the more it blocks the camera's view of exactly what it's about to grab.

[park44]

@carol.robinson Not sure I fully agree here. Object occlusion by the robot's own hand during the final approach to a grasp is a common and annoying perception problem - the closer the hand gets to a good grasp position, the more it blocks the camera's view of exactly what it's about to grab. Cable routing through a wrist joint with multiple degrees of freedom is a genuinely tricky mechanical design problem - tendons and wiring both need enough slack to avoid binding through the full range of motion without tangling or fraying over thousands of cycles. Totally unrelated but has anyone else noticed how fast component costs are dropping this year.

[carlossanchez]

Speaking from personal experience here, Bimanual manipulation - two arms coordinating on one task - is harder than it looks mostly because of the added degrees of freedom and the timing/force coordination required; a lot of 'two-handed' demos are actually closer to two independent single-hand tasks done in sequence. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[jonathan.rao1]

@carlossanchez Related question - Compliant wrists that absorb impact during a bad approach or misjudged contact reduce mechanical stress on the whole arm, which matters a lot for long-term reliability even though it's a less visible feature than the hand itself. Cable routing through a wrist joint with multiple degrees of freedom is a genuinely tricky mechanical design problem - tendons and wiring both need enough slack to avoid binding through the full range of motion without tangling or fraying over thousands of cycles.

[scott21]

@jonathan.rao1 Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: Payload-to-hand-weight ratio varies a lot across current dexterous hands, and it's a meaningful tradeoff - more DoF and finer sensing generally means more actuators and mass in the hand itself, which eats into the arm's usable payload budget.

[scott21]

Here's what I know on this: Wet, oily, or otherwise low-friction objects are still a genuine edge case for most current hands, since tactile sensing and grasp-force controllers are typically tuned and validated on dry, higher-friction test objects. Object occlusion by the robot's own hand during the final approach to a grasp is a common and annoying perception problem - the closer the hand gets to a good grasp position, the more it blocks the camera's view of exactly what it's about to grab. This whole thread is a good reminder how young this field still is.