One big issue is the "joints". It's always a trade-off between mass, strength, speed, precision, and dexterity. State of the art is matching or exceeding organic joints on 2-3 axis, while being an order of magnitude below human/animal performance on the two other axis.
Human individual fingers can withstand internal loads of hundreds of newtons, (possibly a thousand for brief periods if you're a star rock-climber), while at the same being capable of tasks such as writing, which require high speeds and (sub-)millimeter precision, while also enjoying 4 degrees of freedom (5 for the thumb), and they're stuffed full of sensory organs to boot. Oh and they're also self-healing, so taking some damage during use is no problem and they will actually adapt to the task they're used for over time. Everything we can make compared to this is laughably primitive.
If you make an agile robot big, it now weighs more, which means its joints now need to handle greater loads, which makes it necessary to make them much bulkier and heavier.
A lot of this is just inherent limitations of electric motors and having to convert rotational energy. This gets heavy fast.
Decent synthetic electrically-driven muscle fibers would go a long way.
alt Hacker News
One big issue is the "joints". It's always a trade-off between mass, strength, speed, precision, and dexterity. State of the art is matching or exceeding organic joints on 2-3 axis, while being an order of magnitude below human/animal performance on the two other axis.
Human individual fingers can withstand internal loads of hundreds of newtons, (possibly a thousand for brief periods if you're a star rock-climber), while at the same being capable of tasks such as writing, which require high speeds and (sub-)millimeter precision, while also enjoying 4 degrees of freedom (5 for the thumb), and they're stuffed full of sensory organs to boot. Oh and they're also self-healing, so taking some damage during use is no problem and they will actually adapt to the task they're used for over time. Everything we can make compared to this is laughably primitive.
If you make an agile robot big, it now weighs more, which means its joints now need to handle greater loads, which makes it necessary to make them much bulkier and heavier.
A lot of this is just inherent limitations of electric motors and having to convert rotational energy. This gets heavy fast.
Decent synthetic electrically-driven muscle fibers would go a long way.