Param Nayar

The embodiment gap is the hardest problem in robotics today, says @toomanyparams, CEO at @DeadReckoningAI, a company that builds tactile sensing for robots. Robots are meant to do productive work, and that work happens through their hands. The industry has not settled on a design for those hands. It is still open whether they should have two, three or five fingers, how many degrees of freedom they need, and what tactile sensor resolution to use. Tactile sensor resolution is measured in taxels, which are the touch equivalent of pixels. Many new hand designs are now appearing. But if a robot hand does not use the same sensors or the same layout as a human hand, the data collected from humans is not as valuable. Param says it can be almost meaningless. The same issue applies to hardware choices. Teams picking a model should pick the hardware that model was trained on, because that is the closest match to the embodiment the model learned from. Param says the state of the art hands look and feel impressive, and he has tried some himself, but the gap remains the main obstacle for robot hands.

Brett Adcock is one of humanoid robotics’ biggest hype men. @Figure_robot is valued at $39B; @Forbes says he's worth $23.4B. Nearly two years ago, he said he saw a path to 100,000 robots across two customers in four years. How far has Figure gotten? Our profile 🤖: forbes.com/sites/annatong/20…

Open-source magnetic tactile sensor for $5! 🧲 Researchers from New York University introduced a magnetic tactile sensor that's low-cost, and easy to fabricate, democratizing tactile sensing for robotics. Operating in unstructured environments like homes and offices requires robots to sense forces during physical interaction. Yet the lack of a versatile, accessible tactile sensor has led to fragmented solutions and often force-unaware, sensorless approaches. Building an eFlesh sensor requires four components: a hobbyist 3D printer, off-the-shelf magnets (less than $5), a CAD model, and a magnetometer circuit board. The sensor is 3D printed with magnets embedded in the middle layer. Based on chosen mechanical properties, magnets displace in response to contact forces, measured by a magnetometer underneath. An open-source design tool converts simple OBJ/STL files into 3D-printable STLs. This enables application-specific sensors for robot hands, grippers, quadruped feet, and more. Slip detection generalizes to unseen objects with 95% accuracy. Visual-tactile control policies improve manipulation by 40% over vision-only baselines, achieving 90% success on precise tasks like plug insertion and credit card swiping. All design files, code, trained models, and conversion tools are openly available. 🔗 Project page: e-flesh.com ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

Can’t beat a Founders Inc boat tour What a great start to Blueprint II @fdotinc