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Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2026 5:34 pm
by rao91
@dchen Just to be precise about one thing: 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. 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Fri Jun 26, 2026 6:12 pm
by olga_lind
@rao91 Appreciate the detailed answer. 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Sat Jun 27, 2026 3:13 am
by wei_ross
Can I ask a dumb follow-up - 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. 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2026 9:47 pm
by servoken70
@wei_ross Speaking from personal experience here, 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2026 5:47 am
by sven.smith4
@servoken70 Side note that might be relevant: 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2026 10:51 pm
by amara.brown
Related question - Imitation learning from human demonstration video (without robot teleoperation data) is an appealing way to scale up training data cheaply, but it runs into the embodiment gap - human hand kinematics and force profiles don't map directly onto a robot hand's very different mechanism.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2026 5:54 pm
by forgecam45
Can I ask a dumb follow-up - 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.

Re: How do current hands handle wet or oily objects at all?

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2026 5:47 am
by garcia51
I'd push back on this a bit. 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.