Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
Why Robot Arms Still Cant Wipe a Countertop
Lucas and Luna tackle one of the most deceptive challenges in robotics: wiping a countertop. It sounds simple, but it requires real-time force control, surface estimation, and dirt detection—problems that still stump most industrial arms. They break down the physics using the example of a KUKA LBR iiwa attempting to clean a spill of maple syrup, explaining why even million-dollar robots struggle with a task a five-year-old can master. The episode covers tactile sensing limitations, the difficulty of modeling viscoelastic fluids, and recent research from MIT CSAIL using a specialized soft…
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