Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
Why Robot Arms Still Cant Chop an Onion
In this episode, Lucas and Luna dive into the surprisingly difficult challenge of teaching a robot arm to chop an onion. While industrial robots can weld car frames with millimeter precision, the humble onion reveals the limits of current tactile sensing and adaptive control. Lucas explains how the varying hardness, layered structure, and juiciness of an onion create a nightmare for force feedback algorithms. Luna asks whether deep learning can help, and Lucas points to recent research from MIT's CSAIL that used a dataset of over 1,000 onion slices to train a model, yet still fails with…
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