Quick googling brings smaller than a penny strain/pressure sensors under $10. That is a sense of touch enough for most of the tasks.
Quick googling brings smaller than a penny strain/pressure sensors under $10. That is a sense of touch enough for most of the tasks.
True, most of the tasks can be done with off-the-shelf hardware already. But single task robotics is already a solved problem, what the humanoid robots are about is multi-task, aimed at replacing the tasks that still require human hands / legs / eyes / brains / etc.
But I think most of those can be replaced by existing robotics as well anyway. I mean take car manufacturing, over time more and more humans were replaced by robots, and nowadays the newest car factories are mostly automated (see lights-out manufacturing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)). Interestingly a Japanese robot factory has been lights-out since 2001, where they can run for 30 days on end without any lights, humans, heating or cooling.
The article points out that the human hand has over 10000 sensors with specific spatial layout and various specialised purposes (pressure / vibration / stretching / temperature) that require different mechanical connections between the sensor and the skin.
You don't need all those for most tasks modern tasks though. Sure if you wanna sew a coat or something like that, but most modern day tasks require very little of that sort of skill.
the Nature limited us to just 2 hands for all tasks and purposes. The humanoids have no such limitations.
>10000 sensors with specific spatial layout and various specialised purposes (pressure / vibration / stretching / temperature) that require different mechanical connections between the sensor and the skin.
mechanical connection wouldn't be an issue if we lithograph the sensors right onto the "skin" similarly to chips.
Sorry, I meant to emphasize _different_ mechanical connections. That a sensor that detects pressure has a different mechanical linkage than the one detecting vibration. So you need multiple different manufacturing techniques to replicate that at correspondingly higher cost.
The “more than 10000” also has a large impact in size (sensors need to be very small) and cost (you are not paying for one sensor but 10000).
Of course some applications can do with much less. IIUC the article is all about a _universal_ humanoid robot, able to do _all_ tasks.