Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
How Robot Arms Learned to Cut a Lemon
Episode 90 of The Robotics Podcast. Lucas and Luna explore why precision cutting—specifically halving a lemon—remains a surprisingly hard problem for industrial robot arms. They break down the physics of deformable objects, the role of real-time force feedback, and a recent breakthrough from a team at MIT CSAIL that used reinforcement learning to teach a robot arm to adapt its cut depth based on lemon ripeness. Along the way, they discuss why citrus is a benchmark for robotic dexterity, the limits of vision-only systems, and what this means for food-processing automation. If you're…
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