A mobile retail robot using an open-source robot arm to pick items from store shelves.
It’s a simple demo, but a nice example of real-world manipulation: finding the item, reaching into the shelf, gripping it, and placing it into the cart.
The open-source hardware angle makes it especially interesting for robotics builders.
A lot of humanoid demos focus on walking, balance, and whole-body motion, but I keep coming back to the hand as the harder problem.
This demo shows a dexterous robotic hand doing object manipulation tasks. The hardware is interesting, but the bigger question for me is: what should a robot hand learn first if the goal is useful real-world manipulation?
Reliable pinch grasp? Tool use? Opening containers? Handling soft/deformable objects?
Curious what people here think is the best first benchmark for a general-purpose robot hand.
Now he just hangs out on my screen while I work, being surprisingly well-behaved on the desktop. 😂