What's the maintenance burden really look like for a 16+ DoF hand in daily ops?

[betty.king]

@ethan.lewis5 Counterpoint: 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.

[camila.jackson0]

@betty.king I'd frame this differently. Tendon-driven fingers let you move the heavier actuators back into the palm or forearm, keeping the fingers themselves light and fast, but they introduce cable routing, tensioning, and long-term wear problems that direct-actuated fingers don't have.

[nicole10]

@camila.jackson0 This raises a question for me - Tendon-driven fingers let you move the heavier actuators back into the palm or forearm, keeping the fingers themselves light and fast, but they introduce cable routing, tensioning, and long-term wear problems that direct-actuated fingers don't have.

[wei_ross]

@nicole10 Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: Grasp planning for deformable or non-rigid objects (bags, cables, cloth) remains one of the genuinely unsolved problems in manipulation - rigid-body grasp models simply don't capture how the object will behave once contact starts. 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.

[nicole57]

Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. 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.