A human can potentially train a robotic agent by demonstration or oral instruction. However, it is unlikely that robots will match human success rate, dexterity, speed, in an uncontrolled or better yet in a collaborative environment. That performance gap will continue to make it uneconomic.
The main barrier and in my opinion the gap in robotics still is that joint proprioception/sensing and end effector sensing are still very far away from the richness and density of information any primate has in their arms and hands.
Robotic manipulators are the equivalent to being able to actuate your arms and hands while anaesthetized of most the sensory information out of your braquial nerve.
You can still actuate and complete most tasks with limited sensing and visual servoing but you will likely never perform at the level of yourself without any anaesthesia.
For an even more obvious intuition human finger tips have about 200 mecanoreceptors per square centimeter. That would be equivalent to a robotic grasper with 200x very sensitive 6DOF force sensors per square centimetre. And this is just one of our senses (You have specialized receptors for pressure, vibration, tensile force, temperature, 'pain' in skin, muscle, connective tissue, joint capsules,etc.)
tuatoru · 9h ago
Thank you for this. It's a very succint summary of my reservations.
I would add that my reaction on reading the paragraph about the "blue collar colleague" was "that's a health and safety nightmare. Never going to happen."
The thing about the real world is that it's a bit more complicated than desk work. Even roads, heavily simplified and standardised as they are, have proven challenging for self-driving cars.
doormatt · 11h ago
The whole thing reads like it's been written by an AI.
The main barrier and in my opinion the gap in robotics still is that joint proprioception/sensing and end effector sensing are still very far away from the richness and density of information any primate has in their arms and hands.
Robotic manipulators are the equivalent to being able to actuate your arms and hands while anaesthetized of most the sensory information out of your braquial nerve.
You can still actuate and complete most tasks with limited sensing and visual servoing but you will likely never perform at the level of yourself without any anaesthesia.
For an even more obvious intuition human finger tips have about 200 mecanoreceptors per square centimeter. That would be equivalent to a robotic grasper with 200x very sensitive 6DOF force sensors per square centimetre. And this is just one of our senses (You have specialized receptors for pressure, vibration, tensile force, temperature, 'pain' in skin, muscle, connective tissue, joint capsules,etc.)
I would add that my reaction on reading the paragraph about the "blue collar colleague" was "that's a health and safety nightmare. Never going to happen."
The thing about the real world is that it's a bit more complicated than desk work. Even roads, heavily simplified and standardised as they are, have proven challenging for self-driving cars.