Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
Why Robot Arms Still Cant Handle a Cable
In Episode 25 of The Robotics Podcast, Lucas and Luna tackle one of robotics' most stubborn unsolved problems: cable manipulation. Why can't a robot arm reliably plug in a USB cable or route a charging cord? The hosts dive into the physics of flexible objects — how cables have near-infinite degrees of freedom, why force-torque sensors struggle with variable stiffness, and why even deep learning fails at this task. They discuss a 2025 MIT CSAIL paper that achieved 72 percent success rate on cable routing using a novel tactile sleeve sensor, compared to 12 percent for standard…
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