Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
Why Robot Arms Still Cant Handle a Wet Paper Towel
Episode 84 of The Robotics Podcast dives into the astonishing difficulty of gripping, tearing, and crumpling a wet paper towel. Lucas and Luna explore the physics of capillary adhesion, the limits of current gripper designs, and why a task that takes a human half a second still baffles the world's best roboticists. They look at a 2025 paper from MIT's CSAIL lab that measured the force variation in a single pull of a wet towel and why that data point matters more than you'd think. If you want to understand why your kitchen robot won't be wiping down countertops anytime…
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