Yale's Robot Hand Copies How Your Fingers Work to Improve Object Manipulation

In-hand manipulation is one of the things near the top of a very, very, very long list of things that humans do without thinking that are extraordinarily difficult for robots. It's the act of repositioning an object with one hand, usually with your fingers--you do it whenever you pick up a pen, for example, to switch from a "picking up" grasp to a "writing something" grasp. Next time you do this, pay attention to the intricate, coordinated motion that happens, and ask yourself just how in the world you could honestly expect a robot to do something similar. And yet, robots are learning to do such things. For example, OpenAI recently taught a five-fingered hand to manipulate a cube, which is great, if you have a lot of patience and/or computing resources, and the budget for a fancy hand and stuff.