For years, Shadow Robot Company’s Shadow Hand has arguably been the gold standard for robotic manipulation. Beautiful and expensive, it is able to mimic the form factor and functionality of human hands, which has made it ideal for complex tasks. I’ve personally experienced how amazing it is to use Shadow Hands in a teleoperation context, and it’s hard to imagine anything better. The problem with the original Shadow hand was (and still is) fragility. In a research environment, this has been fine, except that research is changing: Roboticists no longer carefully program manipulation tasks by, uh, hand. Now it’s all about machine learning, in which you need robotic hands to massively fail over and over again until they build up enough data to understand how to succeed. “We’ve aimed for robustness and performance over anthropomorphism and human size and shape.” —Rich Walker, Shadow Robot Company Doing this with a Shadow Continuer la lecture The New Shadow Hand Can Take a Beating→