If there’s one simple skill roboticists would love to steal from humans, it’s our ability to pick things up. Apples or eggs, pens or power drills; it doesn’t matter to us. Our hands are dextrous, able to grasp a range of shapes, and — more importantly — we can calculate how to handle any object we’ve not seen before in a flash.
Robots, by comparison, are slow and clumsy butterfingers. Their hardware is capable of doing the actual grasping, but they get confused by even tiny changes in size, shape, or position. This is a big a problem if we ever want robots to be helpful around the house, or if we want to improve their utility in warehouses, factories, and other industrial settings.
A startup named Embodied Intelligence is one of a crop...
