Dexterous robotic hands manipulate thousands of objects with ease

At just one year old, a baby is more dexterous than a robot. Sure, machines can do more than just pick up and put down objects, but we're not quite there as far as replicating a natural pull toward exploratory or sophisticated dexterous manipulation goes. Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI gave it a try with Dactyl (meaning "finger," from the Greek word "daktylos"), using their humanoid robot hand to solve a Rubik's cube with software that's a step toward more general AI, and a step away from the common single-task mentality. DeepMind created "RGB-Stacking," a vision-based system that challenges a robot to learn how to grab items and stack them. Scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), in the ever-present quest to get machines to replicate human abilities, created a framework that's more scaled up: a system that can reorient over 2,000 different objects, with the robotic hand facing both upwards and downwards.