Like it or not, we’re surrounded by robots. Thousands of Americans ride to work these days in cars that pretty much drive themselves. Vacuum cleaners scoot around our living rooms on their own. Quadcopter drones automatically zip over farm fields, taking aerial surveys that help farmers grow their crops. Even scary-looking humanoid robots, ones that can jump and run like us, may be commercially available in the near future.
Robotic devices are getting pretty good at moving around our world without any intervention from us. But despite these newfound skills, they still come with a major weakness: The most talented of the bunch can still be stopped in their tracks by a simple doorknob.
The issue, says Matt Mason, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, is that for all of robots’ existing abilities to move around the world autonomously, they can’t yet physically interact with objects in a meaningful way once they get there.
“What have we learned from robotics? The number one lesson is that manipulation is hard. This is contrary to our individual experience, since almost every human is a skilled manipulator,” writes Mason in a recent review article.
It’s a fair point. We humans manipulate the world around us without thinking. We grab, poke, twist, chop and prod objects almost unconsciously, thanks in part to our incredibly dexterous hands. As a result, we’ve built our worlds with those appendages in mind. All the cellphones, keyboards, radios and other tools we’ve handled throughout our lifetime have been designed explicitly to fit into our fingers and palms.
