In this episode, I speak with Scott Walter, PhD, Robotics Research Diligence Director at RoboStrategy. We started with Tesla and Figure’s opposing experiences with tendon-driven humanoid hands, then spent more than an hour pulling apart what a robotic hand actually needs to do.
Scott is a mechanical and aerospace engineer, a 2-time robotics founder, and one of the sharpest public readers of humanoid-hand architecture. He has worked through Tesla’s hand iterations, Figure’s decision to abandon its first tendon-driven design, 1X’s routing choices, and the direct-drive approaches behind Wuji and Sharpa Wave.
This was a particularly fun and wide-ranging conversation. We used three extreme designs to escape the usual tendon-versus-motor argument: Allonic’s braided structure, Daxo’s maximalist system with up to 120 tendons, and Tacta’s hydraulic hand, glove, sensing, and data stack. Tacta is especially interesting because it is designed as a complete manipulation system for cobots and industrial arms, without trying to fit inside a humanoid.
The side paths were just as useful. Scott proposed a decathlon for humanoids, complete with pole vault, hurdles, baton exchange, and the same sand pit humans use. We also asked whether robots should copy human movement at all, and whether a general-purpose body still becomes specialized through its profession, as humans do.
In this episode we cover:
Why Tesla and Figure reached different conclusions about tendons
What Bowden tubes solve, and what they add at the wrist
Why joint count and independent control are different metrics
What the Humanoid Games reveal about robot-specific movement
Scott’s proposal for a humanoid decathlon
What Allonic, Daxo, and Tacta teach at the design extremes
Why Tacta is building a manipulation system outside the humanoid
How generalized bodies can still become specialized workers
Scott Walter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-walter-ph-d-b2a78ab/
RoboStrategy: https://robostrategy.co/
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VbwM0t1oJQI
Every episode, I sit down with the founders, researchers, and operators building physical AI worldwide, tracing the full stack from components and supply chains to what actually deploys. See all published episodes here.
Chapters
00:00 Cold open: the labor prize and the 5-year forecast
00:24 The Fermi paradox of robotic hands
01:18 Tesla, Figure and the tendon debate
05:10 Bowden tubes and routing tendons through a wrist
11:15 Joints, actuators and real degrees of control
14:38 Why the pinky matters more than it looks
17:23 Humanoid Games as real-world robotics experiments
21:57 Scott’s humanoid decathlon challenge
26:28 Tesla’s hand iterations and abandoned designs
27:55 Wuji and Sharpa Wave put motors in the fingers
38:29 What 3 extreme hand designs can teach us
38:53 Allonic’s braided hand and portfolio disclosure
51:15 Daxo’s maximalist hand with up to 120 tendons
01:02:36 Tacta measures how workers use their fingers
01:05:18 A robotic-hand system designed outside the humanoid
01:13:12 Data-center cables as a tactile manipulation task
01:16:22 General-purpose bodies and specialized work
01:19:18 Why this 5-year robotics forecast may be different
Full Transcript
Below is the full transcript. There may be errors as it’s AI-transcribed.
00:00:00 — Cold open — excerpt montage
Scott Walter · 00:00:00
That is the biggest pie we’ve ever seen, ever, trying to automate labor. And sim-to-real gap is almost zero. So locomotion is a solved problem. Humanoids will be deployed like five years after everyone stops laughing. And they’re the worst they’re ever going to be. They’re just going to get better and better and better.
00:00:23 — Why dexterous robot hands are still hard
Scott Walter · 00:00:23
And what I call the Fermi paradox of robotic hands. If they exist, where are they? And that’s always been the problem: you see them in the labs and then you go around and you’re like: I’m not seeing them anywhere. No one’s able to do them. And the question is: why is that the case? It’s extremely challenging to come up with something that has not only dexterity, something you can control, but also robustness. But what I was seeing during the teens is that robotic hands were suddenly becoming a possibility because machine learning made it possible. Before then, they were just really, really hard to control.
Scott Walter · 00:00:56
And that’s what the Shadow Hand proved: you can have this tendon-driven hand. And if you connect it to really good machine learning algorithms, you’d be amazed that you’d be able to do. The problem was that the robustness wasn’t there, the cost factor, everything else. So that’s kind of the preload that we’re seeing it. And why aren’t they becoming more and more available? Now, the big debate that is going on in hands in general.
00:01:18 — Tesla, Figure, and the tendon debate
Scott Walter · 00:01:18
And so people really started paying attention to robotic hands when Elon announced a 22 DOF hand that was going to go on Optimus and the revealing of that and everything like that. And after that it was like this Cambrian explosion of just robotic hand designs all over the place and everyone pursuing different designs. And for the most part, you could break it down into two categories, tendon-based hands and non-tendon-based hands, which most people would say direct drive. But even there, you have to break them down because you can never really put things in two different buckets.
Scott Walter · 00:01:52
They’re all going to go down there. But you can kind of look at it that way. And everyone’s pursuing it. And they all were very passionate about their designs and why theirs was the best approach. Some people would try one and they would kind of think about it again and then try a different approach. But about two weeks ago, Brett Adcock put out a post where he talked about the evolution of the hand designs at Figure and that the very first generation hand that they built was a tendon-based hand. And after attempting to do that he came to the conclusion that a tendon-based hand was basically an engineering dead end.
Scott Walter · 00:02:24
And he called it the biggest engineering mistake he’d ever made. And since then, he’s been pursuing hand designs that are non-tendon-based. And that kind of caused, let’s say, a very spirited discussion. And I’m glad it was out there because you got a lot of people that were very much on the side of tendons just going out and just saying he’s completely wrong. From right down to saying it’s a skills issue to explaining why they believe it and their particular thesis for it. As well as you get a lot of support from other people who said, yeah, we tried tendons as well.
Scott Walter · 00:02:55
It turned out to be really hard. Now, I’m not here to defend one position or not. I’m really here to maybe kind of present it to everyone so everyone can kind of come to their own conclusions because they both have their pros and cons. They both have the big engineering challenges in what they’re trying to do. And even within the tendon community, while they agree tendons the right approach, they will get in very spirited arguments about what’s the best approach or not. And you can see that 1X came out with their 22 DOF hand, I think.
Michelle Sun · 00:03:25
I think it’s 25.
Scott Walter · 00:03:28
Yeah, 20. I think it’s actually 22, 44 tendons. It’s kind of hard to know the count. They’re also throwing the wrist in there. So I usually don’t put the wrist in there. But they have what you would typically say is about 22 degrees of freedom of movement of the fingers. Quite complicated design.
00:03:43 — Routing tendons through the wrist
Scott Walter · 00:03:43
And the biggest challenge with all the hands is not having the tendons that can actually move the fingers and putting down the forearm, but figuring out how to get them through a wrist. The wrist isn’t in there. It’s an easier problem. I’m not going to say it’s easy. It’s not. But as soon as you do that you add this extra level of complexity that the engineering solutions are challenging. And bodies are fairly simple to model. But when we start getting into flexible stuff, there’s a lot of challenges. And we are doing it in our heads because we’ve been doing it for so many times that we know we can move our wrists and somehow keep our fingers constant.
Scott Walter · 00:04:19
But if we’re not doing that we will see that our fingers will kind of move as we are moving our wrist just because the length is changing. Now, in theory, you can solve the problem by having all your tendons go right through the center of rotation of your wrist. Okay? In theory, you could do that. The reality is there’s something called, I think it’s the Pauli principle. Two particles cannot occupy the same point in space at the same time. So you need room. It’s like you’re talking about before tendons. They can’t all occupy the same spaces.
Scott Walter · 00:04:51
So when they go around there, there’s just always going to be that. And then there’s this other problem is that when you’re doing it, sometimes if the tendon’s coming straight up and you’re going, that means suddenly you have to do this very sharp angled turn. And tendons do not like sharp angled turns. You need to have a kind of radius in there. So there’s big challenges to being able to do that. And there’s different schools of thoughts on how to do it. And there’s this thing called a Bowden tube. And everyone’s like: whoa, what’s that?
Michelle Sun · 00:05:15
Is that what 1X is?
Scott Walter · 00:05:20
Yeah, they’re using the Bowden tubes. And basically, if you’ve ever ridden the bicycle and look at your brakes and the brake cables, that outer tube on the outside, on the inside is a wire, which is effectively like a tendon. And the tube helps redirect that and maintain the same length. That’s the trick. That’s why you can turn your handlebars without suddenly the brakes engaging or disengaging or something like that. Or your gears changing or anything like that because you’re able to maintain the length through those things. Now, those are already engineering challenges. They have friction.
Scott Walter · 00:05:53
They take up space. They can snap as well. So within the hand community itself, there’s like a big debate on whether to do Bowden tubes or not. And the original Tesla hand that they showed at the 1010 event had them. And then the next time they had the public showing of them, they didn’t have them. And so everyone’s trying to figure out how do we route these things through there. And this is why you can see all the people that are building the direct drive ones have given up. They just say that is just a challenge.
00:06:23 — Tendon materials, flexion, and extension
Scott Walter · 00:06:23
The other main thing is what is the material you use for a tendon? If you use a cable like you see in a bicycle, the problem with that is the bending radius is not very good. And they tend to elongate over time. Anyone that’s had a bicycle knows you have to go and retune everything and make those adjustments because they’re going to stretch. And the other thing about metal is that anytime you bend it, there’s energy involved in the flexing of it, which means that’s energy going not to your hands. If you use something like rope or thread, it has much better properties that way.
Scott Walter · 00:07:00
It’s very flexible, very easy to move around. The radius of curvature is a little bit different, but they can fray and also stretch and everything else. So you’re worried about wear and tear. But there’s this magic material out there called Dyneema, which is used for climbing ropes and everything else is extremely flexible. It’s this aramid polymer, which is just kind of miraculous and doesn’t stretch very well and has very good abrasive properties. And it’s readily available. You can go on Amazon. You can just order it in any color you want. So anyone that is, an amateur building their own hands at home by using a 3D printer, and there’s plenty of open source hand projects out there, the Paloma project is one example.
Scott Walter · 00:07:39
You just put that in there. So it’s very easy. And they’re all using the same thing. Rock climbers use it for a reason because it’s like it doesn’t break and it doesn’t stretch. And also, it’s got this one great property that another kind of aramid known as Vectran doesn’t have, and that is it does not break down with UV light. Okay? So Vectran is very sensitive to UV. It will break down. But it has some properties a little bit better than Dyneema. And if it’s inside, ah, maybe it is that. So usually it’s two of those.
Scott Walter · 00:08:10
Or there might be some sort of, magic hybrids of these things where sometimes people might even put in stiffness. So by adding metal. One advantage of a wire cable: the problem with any sort of thread is that it’s really great in tension, and as soon as they’re trying to push on, it collapses. So I can only apply force in one direction. Bicycle cables, we know, work better in one direction, but they still work a little bit in the other. They will a little bit, but usually on the brakes, we still have a spring to help open them up.
Scott Walter · 00:08:42
The problem with a tendon-based hand is that you’ve got two ways of moving. One tendon gives you the flexion. And in order for you to open up your grasp, what they call extension, you need a second tendon, which is called extensor, to pull it back open. Or you need a spring return. And that’s not necessarily a great way to do it. And that’s because when you push on a thread, you’re not getting anything out of it. With a Bowden tube, you can do it a little bit, but mainly all you’re doing is taking the pressure off as opposed to pushing it back.
Scott Walter · 00:09:15
Unless it’s a bicycle cable and unless it’s human tendon. It turns out human tendons are an amazing thing because they can take pretty heavy loads and they actually can give a little bit. So our tendons are able to push back, not 100%, but much better than Dyneema. So there’s already a difference between what they’re using and an actual human tendon. Yeah. No one’s made that material yet because it has, the properties of a metal cable without being a metal cable. It has the properties of a Dyneema without being a metal cable. It’s like if someone could figure out how to make that thing, that would be a lot better because then you would be able to push pull.
00:09:50 — Direct drive, linkages, and degrees of control
Scott Walter · 00:09:50
And this is where the people that want to have what I call the direct drive are going to be in there. And there’s a couple ways to break down the direct drive. The first way is, everyone was trying to say, where’s the space to put our motors? If we can’t put them down in the forearm because we don’t want to have to go through this wrist mechanism. Well, it seems like there’s a lot of space in the palm. So everyone says, let’s go ahead and put something there. And the first generation Tesla hand did that but they actuated the hand actually with a tendon, which is a metal tendon.
Scott Walter · 00:10:20
And they realized all those things stretch and stuff like that. But the run link was very short and you didn’t have to run it through here. Others said, well, wait a minute. There’s another way that we can do that have the same thing with a tendon. And that is to use a linkage-based mechanism for that. So they created basically these mechanical links that go through there. And the advantage of a mechanical link is that it works in both directions, in tension and compression. So that means you only need one motor and it can give the same amount of grip strength as well as opening strength.
Scott Walter · 00:10:50
It can go both ways and it can lock in really tight and everything like that. Whereas if you’re using a tendon, you would need the second tendon or you need a spring return. In some cases, you might need a second motor unless you wrap it around like a capstan. But then it’s hard to separate the tugging from both of them because there’s a lot of complications here. Now, when we talk about degrees of freedom in joints, they’re two completely separate things. We have a lot of joints in our fingers. Our fingers have, you consider, four degrees of freedom.
Scott Walter · 00:11:21
Now, you might say there’s only really four IP joints. One of them is not called an IP joint. It has to be called the MCP down here. But it has two degrees of freedom. It can flex, and it can do this ab/adduction that everyone talks about. And then we have the other IP joints here. But for the most part, there are four ways that it can move, four joints there. The question is, how do you control that? And degrees of freedom really means more or less degrees of control. So if I have a single tendon through there with a single motor, I have only one degree of freedom.
Scott Walter · 00:11:49
And then what’s going to happen is there’s going to be coupling between them and my finger is just going to move like that. It’s very difficult to get different degrees of control without adding more motors for that. And so what ends up happening with a linkage-based mechanism is that you already have the coupling. And in many cases, there’s only four or five motors in there. So those fingers really only had five or six degrees of freedom, depending by the number of motors, even though they may have had like 15 joints, 15 ways of moving. And so what happened is that they would collapse down like that.
Scott Walter · 00:12:21
We assume they’re all identical. It’s like: nah, there’s a lot of stuff. So the thumb has way more kind of range, different kind of range of motion, more tendons than the other. I think our thumb has anywhere between eight and nine. And it’s like: well, what’s the answer? And it’s like: depends who you ask because it just shows how kind of nuanced some of these answers people are going to have. But typically, it’s more than what you would see in the others. And the thing with this closing like that is that we really don’t want our fingers to close this way where everything is coupled and there’s only one way of closing.
Scott Walter · 00:12:51
And that is, it means when you go to grab a bottle or something like that your fingers can actually miss. Try coming down and suddenly, we want to have the straight move and then have that clasping. So that’s something that’s important. Now, you can kind of do that with a mechanical linkage in that what you do is you have like an escapement mechanism, block mechanism. So it’s like the very clever that you can get it that when it’ll move like this and once it gets there, something kind of engages and now the fingers do this.
Scott Walter · 00:13:17
Okay. So you get this nice illusion that you have more degrees of freedom of control there and you really don’t. You’ve programmed it in. It means, oh, I can’t do this. I have to do that to close it. It’s the reality. But it’ll work in a lot of cases and you can get away with fewer motors and you do have that nice strength of being able to open things up really quickly. So that’s a lot of the advantages of this direct drive: it’s almost tendon-based, except the tendons are super rigid. One of the problems is when you get those mechanisms, it’s pretty easy to build linkages that will just give you this.
Scott Walter · 00:13:49
But once you do that you’re starting to have that same problem we talked about with the wrist. Okay, I get some mechanism that’s pulling up and down here. How am I going to build this linkage mechanism that not only is going to do this, but allows me to suddenly redirect everything along there. It can be done. It’s just that it’s a more complicated mechanical design and then the decisions of how you control the abduction. So we’ve got basically five ways of doing abduction. Do we have five motors or do we have a single motor? Those are the decisions everyone has to make.
00:14:18 — Why the pinky matters
Michelle Sun · 00:14:18
Yeah. And one of the things that stood out to me about the fingers is that for carrying heavy loads, right, I read that the pinky actually does a lot of work as well. So it’s more than we think and we don’t think about it when we do that.
Scott Walter · 00:14:35
Oh, way more than you think. The other thing that pinky does: there’s this big argument, and one of my podcast colleagues, Gustav Andersson, has pointed this out. I’ll ask you a question. If you had to lose one of your fingers, which one would you choose?
Michelle Sun · 00:14:54
Probably the ring finger.
Scott Walter · 00:14:56
Okay. Some people say the ring finger. Some people would go with a pinky. And it turns out he actually says it’s the index finger. I’m like: what? He’s a hand surgeon. He knows better. And part of it is because if you take out the ring finger or something like that you get like a weird gap. The pinky is more important than we think. And it turns out that our middle finger can take over for the index finger very easily. People are able to get that kind. That was, kind of shocking to me. And I only assumed it.
Scott Walter · 00:15:22
And the main thing about the pinky is not so much that it’s strong, but where it is, where it’s placed. When you want to grab something with authority, if I’m just grabbing it with these two fingers, you see it wants to move around. And if I get the others in there, it still can move around a little bit. And you’ll see this when, these robot hands are picking up a hammer. A lot of times, the hammer is really not in there. Well, it turns out when you get that pinky engaged in there, suddenly that thing is, just mechanically locked better than when the others are in there.
Scott Walter · 00:15:48
And a lot of it just comes down to simple physics, and that is you have kind of a fulcrum that whatever you’re grabbing usually is resting right in there. And then these others are trying to come around, but they don’t have as good a lever arm, right, because the distance of where that’s happening. The pinky comes down here, and the distance from here to here is so big. It doesn’t have to be strong. It gets it just from simple mechanical advantage of the distance.
Michelle Sun · 00:16:10
Yeah, it’s locking in that grip and stabilizing it.
Scott Walter · 00:16:14
And you see that with a lot of tools that you have, the way the grips are all set up. Is that pinky is in there that gives you that final amount of stabilization that is remarkable. And again, it’s just kind of a geometric thing. And why the nuance and the subtlety of what goes on with hands is so underappreciated until you start going in there. Now, this is the other thing that I invite everyone at home to do. A lot of times when you’re designing stuff, you have to make these prototypes and experiments. So, if you’re building a car or drones, you just got to go in there.
Scott Walter · 00:16:45
You can think about it a little bit, but you got to build the darn thing. When we start making hypotheses about how a humanoid works, you don’t have to build a humanoid. You are a humanoid. You can run the experiments on your own. And that means you can ask the question, what happens if I reduce the degree of freedom? What if this is removed? What if I try to do everything in the house without my pinky? So, just attempt to see what you can do and how important it is. Take, basically, medical tape, something like this, and just, bind some of your hands.
Scott Walter · 00:17:15
Or put on, really thick gloves. Restrict motion of, one of your shoulder joints. And just ask the question.
00:17:23 — Humanoid Games and real-world experiments
Scott Walter · 00:17:23
And so, a little bit of a cul-de-sac here: the humanoid games in China were fascinating to me. Because we get to see people running these real-world experiments. So, they had these highly optimized bots for running in the 100. And we could say, they’re not truly humanoid because they took away a lot of degrees of freedom. But I am so happy they did that because we are always getting in an argument about how important is that joint to running? How many degrees of freedom do we really need in the shoulder to be able to run effectively and stuff like that?
Scott Walter · 00:17:55
And you can run them in a simulation, and they kind of give you an answer, and you can intuit yourself. But there’s nothing like real-world data. And seeing how they did it, and then you begin to go, huh. And you might say, yeah, what’s important is, we finally understand the nature of a particular joint or particular axis to a degree that we’ve never had before. That we now can understand what’s a better way to optimize it when we want to build the complete one. So, I love the fact that they’re going through, and you have these very specialized events that are forcing you to answer that question in a way that can only be demonstrated with a real running experiment, if you want it that way.
Michelle Sun · 00:18:35
Yeah, for sure. And one of the races I saw that some run-up to humanoids were, leaning forward the whole way. And that was just, really fascinating and, different posture that usually we don’t think about running in, and they just experimented with it.
Scott Walter · 00:18:52
Yeah. And I think one of the best ones is, you may have seen it, is, everyone complains about, AI slop videos or, how people just use AI in a way that’s oh, it’s so bad. And you may have seen someone actually took one of those races and replaced them with humans. So, you saw the human runners, and I was this is great, because what more effective way of explaining what that running form looks like than to do that direct comparison of how they were leaning and everything else? The other thing is, we’ve got to remember, is, they are not built exactly like us.
Scott Walter · 00:19:26
They may look like us, but their musculature is very different. So, they have different power density. They have slightly different kinematics. The weight distribution is very different. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that they have this awkward running form. Now, I do not recommend that human runners run with their arms like that and lean forward, because you’re going to end up with, back pain. But it turned out that the engineers were trying to solve a particular problem, and it was, kind of overheating. And they ran, RL sims to see how we could do that to minimize the movement on one of the shoulder joints.
Scott Walter · 00:19:57
And that was the solution it came up with. And it turned out the solution was highly optimized, better than they all expected. And this is the problem with dealing with human priors, is that everyone’s, forcing their walking policies to look human-like. But it may be that a human-like walking or running policy is not actually the optimum. It might be the suboptimum for these creatures. And so, they come up with it. And I think someone mentioned it. It’s basically, it evolved the tail backwards. Because, velociraptors and others, they need the big tail back there to do that.
Scott Walter · 00:20:25
And effectively, they said they weren’t allowed to have a tail, but they kind of did it that way. It’s, yeah, that’s an interesting way of thinking the problem. So, as silly as that looks, again, for me, I am super excited because I’ve always wanted to know. These are these academic debates that we have all the time. No longer academic. We can point to something. And this is why he’s saying these races are going to be studied for years. Even though they’ll be surpassed by all sorts of things, when you go into teaching any sort of engineering class, you’re going to want to bring that thing up and just say, take a look at this.
Scott Walter · 00:20:57
Just like the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster is still taught in every engineering class on structures and dynamics and everything else because it is so educational. And that 100 meter we saw, it was incredible because of the different phase transitions, again, pitter-patter, how they were going to accelerate, stand up, lean forward. What are you supposed to do? It’s, every track coach will love that as an example to show their sprinters, oh, this is why we want you to do this. Do you understand what we’re talking about now?
Michelle Sun · 00:21:29
Yeah, and I love that they actually have different games, just like the Olympics, right? There’s the sprints, there’s also the long jumps. So the makers can really, design very different robots to optimize for that and train different policies. So it really is pushing to the extreme: what is possible? And how do we rethink the whole architecture from, the joints where they’re put and how they run, how they jump?
00:21:57 — The humanoid decathlon challenge
Scott Walter · 00:21:57
Now, I pointed out already in a couple other podcasts, I’m going to do it again, and I’m putting it out there very, very soon, is I’m throwing down the gauntlet for the humanoid decathlon challenge. And that is actually a humanoid that can do the decathlon. And that’s very challenging because it’s not just about locomotion anymore. There’s a certain amount of manipulation. We can argue whether the degree of the manipulation is totally at the level of human dexterity. And I think you’ll be surprised. It’s pretty close. So, arm strength is going to be incredible, whole body coordination.
Scott Walter · 00:22:30
You’re going to need really good grip strength. You’re going to need, basically, some wrist motions to be able to do some of the events. So, I think it’s a really pretty good proxy of coming up with a humanoid, which is going to be much closer to a real human. And then we can start arguing about world records at that point. So, we would say, what is the form that’s able to do it? And if it’s able to do it successfully, if it breaks the record, then we can say that’s on par. Because Usain Bolt is able to do a lot more things than the robots that broke his record.
Scott Walter · 00:23:02
And one of them, he was able to stop without running into a wall. Okay. He was able to run the curve. And the other thing he pointed out is, not only did he get a gold in the 100, he got a gold in the 200, which meant he had to run the curve. And those bots really could not run the curve because they reduced the degrees of freedom to make sure they’re really good going straight. And the last thing is the last gold medal he got in was in the 4x100 relay, which means there’s a baton exchange, which means there’s a certain amount of manipulation.
Scott Walter · 00:23:30
You actually have to be able to receive the baton and hold on to the baton. And so, in order to get parity, to make it fair, we have to say: what do we do to force someone to build a humanoid that has all these required degrees of freedom, that has to do the 100, has to do the hurdles, has to do the high jump? Has to do the pole vault. The pole vault is going to be a test of strength, not just grip strength, but upper body strength. We didn’t see any robots doing pull-ups. A lot of them aren’t even strong enough to do a pull-up.
Scott Walter · 00:24:04
It’s like we shame how a lot of people can’t do a one pull-up, but the humanoids really, they don’t have enough strength to be able to lift that. So, when you start thinking of an athletic competition like that’s going to be the true test. And again, I’m going to put out the ground rules and everything like that. I hope next year at the games that they have a decathlon in there and they attempt it, and it may be that they struggle. Just like last year, they struggled in the games, right? It was comical. This year, it wasn’t comical.
Scott Walter · 00:24:33
It was like Formula One, NASCAR, kind of disasters going in there, but at the same time, incredible performances. So, you can see where you can go in one year. One year, I have a feeling these bots might struggle through a decathlon, but then they will learn so much that it’s possible. It’s possible in two years they could make an attempt at the men’s world record in the decathlon. So, that’s out there. That’s the challenge I want to have. Let these labs get started on that.
Michelle Sun · 00:25:07
Yeah, definitely. Well, then you can start thinking about building that. And I think we can really expand into all the Olympic sports, right? Like the team sports can be expanded into, and like that will be really fascinating.
Scott Walter · 00:25:22
Cycling, kayaking. You can go down and down the list. And eventually, there will be a humanoid that will probably be able to perform in all of those things. But kind of steps. There’s a lot of things that – strength and dexterity in the decathlon that most people agree is pretty challenging. But there’s not going to be the finesse like we’re not going to have it play the piano when it’s over. Maybe we should. It has to play the Olympic theme music. So, some things like that we know are maybe not fully encompassing, but we need some sort of proxy.
Scott Walter · 00:25:54
We already have the human data on decathlons and how challenging it is. So, let’s start with something we’re all familiar with. And again, exactly the same one. Not oh, we’ll do an event kind of like it. It’s like none of it’s the same. Right down to the long jump. You may notice the long jump, they were landing on the surface. The real long jump, you’re landing in a sand pit. And I have a feeling they didn’t want to land in a sand pit for a reason. And that is, sand gets in your joints.
Scott Walter · 00:26:19
And so, it’s like: no, no, no, no. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it with the exact same little ground rules.
00:26:27 — Tesla’s hand iterations
Michelle Sun · 00:26:27
Yeah. And do you want to go into the Tesla hand still?
Scott Walter · 00:26:33
Yeah, we can briefly talk about it. Because, again, we don’t necessarily want to talk about the hands that have already been talked about to death. So, the lead up of the Tesla hand is that it’s doing it very much like a human. And Elon talked about the advantages putting everything down the forearm. And there’s a lot of people that believe it. And now you’ve got to put tendons in there. And the idea is that you want full hand dexterity. You don’t want these hands that has minimal amount of degrees of freedom. But full hand degrees of freedom so you can play the piano.
Scott Walter · 00:27:02
So, the first generation one was seen at the Tevent. And it was like the prototype. And that was showing Bowden tubes. And if you look at it, you will see that as the wrist moves around that these tubes are kind of bending and going all over the place. And you’ll see the same thing on the 1X hand that they have that. They then abandoned that and came up with something else. And this is like their next generation hand. And there was a lot of patents that were filed on it. There were four or five patents.
Scott Walter · 00:27:27
And then when the patents came out, I did a patent review with Humanoid Hub on that. And one replied to Humanoid Hub’s post on that. It’s like: oh, we abandoned that design. Something like that. It didn’t work. So, a lot of the things that they were working on turned out to be kind of dead ends. And they’ve had to do something else. Of course, we don’t know what that is. And everyone else that’s building tendon-based hands is discovering the same kind of challenges and problems.
00:27:52 — Wuji, Sharpa, and motors in the fingers
Scott Walter · 00:27:52
And then if we go over to the other side of people who are in the direct drives, There’s two other ways of doing it. So, the Wuji hand. So, normally everyone says, let’s put the motors down here and either use linkages or maybe short tendons to be able to do that control. Wuji said, all right, what we’re going to do is we know how to make really small motors. And we’re trying to find space for where to put the motors. And everyone wants to put it in the palm. The problem is you do that. The palm gets pretty big.
Scott Walter · 00:28:18
And they said, well, wait a minute. What’s sort of the biggest point of space in the finger? And it turns out it’s what we call the phalanx, or everyone would call it like the bone. And so, they said, why don’t we make the bones out of motors? Because they’re really big. The other alternative, which we see in like the Sharpa hand and origami and some others, is that to put it actually in the joint. So, build your finger like you would build a robot where every single joint is actually the actuator. The thing is, you don’t have that much space there.
Scott Walter · 00:28:48
And they’re looking at, how can we get something a bit bigger to get the torque density that we’d like to have? So, it makes sense to put there. There’s just one challenge with that. And like with everything, every time you come up with a solution, there’s like these other challenges you’ve got to get around. It’s kind of frustrating. By putting it right at the joint, the motor is spinning in the direction you want the joint to move. And that’s great. And you may or may not need a reducer depending upon your torque density. And what I mean by reducer: a reducer reduces the speed or something.
Scott Walter · 00:29:15
So, if something is spinning really fast and you don’t want it running really fast, you put a gearbox on there. With the advantage, not only does it slow it down, but it gives it more torque. And so, if you have a motor that’s spinning super fast and your finger might close, it’s like: no, no, I don’t want that. I want to slow it down. So, the reducer is there and also give you a bit more grip strength. And the reducer takes up a little space and everything like that. But that’s one way of doing it.
Scott Walter · 00:29:36
But with the Wuji hand, now we’ve got way more space. The problem is the spinning is along the axis of your finger and not perpendicular to it. So, you have to come up with some sort of transmission system to do that. There’s two ways. One is like a bevel gear design that anyone that’s kind of familiar with the differential in the back of their cars is that kind of design. The other is something called a worm gear. And I made a guess just based on kind of like the offset of where the actual joint is that they probably are using a worm gear.
Scott Walter · 00:30:07
And they are. So, the worm gear and the knuckle, they don’t necessarily show up. But I think there were a couple others that they were showing. So that works great for your IP joints. And the thing that’s nice is the distal, the very tip, your fingertip, they don’t have a motor there. Because the motor for moving it is in the one before, which is great. And then, the motor for this one is down here. And then, they get down to the MCP. And the MCP is always the biggest challenge because it has to move two directions.
Scott Walter · 00:30:36
Now, typically, the order of operations of those joints is that flex. And then, the abduction is always a joint before mechanically when they build it. Wuji decided to switch that up. And the reason they decided to switch it up is rather interesting. It might be partly because they figured that there’s an architecturally easier way to do it. And the other is the most important joint when it comes to like grabbing something, as you’re referring, like lifting up your luggage, is that joint. That’s where the grip strength is for trying to hold something, whether it’s a bag of groceries or anything like that.
Scott Walter · 00:31:06
And the other two, basically, they don’t provide very much except they make sure it doesn’t slide off your fingers. And so, that means you would like that thing to have a lot of power. And if you change the order of operations, then it becomes a bit more difficult. And they decided, we’re going to actually put a motor with three times the torque output as the ones that are up here. And we’re going to use that for flexion on the first joint. And so, they did that. And you’ll kind of notice as you look at that finger.
Michelle Sun · 00:31:33
Is that the circle, like the silver?
Scott Walter · 00:31:36
Yeah, you see that circle? That’s your abduction. That’s your abduction coming after the flexion. Right. And they had to come up with an interesting four-bar mechanism to be able to do that. But when I looked at it, they really understand the nature of the problem. And it’s like different than what everyone else did. Now, worm gears are really good at mechanical leverage, way more than most people would give them credit to. The problem is they’re so good at it, they’re very hard to backdrive. They work really well in one direction, but not so much in the other.
Scott Walter · 00:32:05
And you want torque transparency, and you want compliance and everything else. They’ve come up with a second version of a worm gear. There’s another type of modified worm gear that does give you backdrivability. But what it does is it reduces the forward advantage a little bit. It’s like everything. There’s always this compromise. But now they do have a little bit of that mechanical compliance in there. And that’s very important with hands and everything is we want backdrivability. We want them to be compliant. The biggest problem with a lot of these direct drive in the fingers is that you’re moving a ton of mass out into your fingers.
Scott Walter · 00:32:42
So the more mass you have in the fingers, the harder to accelerate, the harder to have compliance and everything else in control. And this is the argument that everyone that’s doing tendon-based hands, and especially like Kyber, which has a very good tendon-based hand, is that their fingers are just so light that they can move around really quickly. So, again, that’s the pros and cons. The other thing is that as you start scaling these motors down, unfortunately, the scaling problem doesn’t work as well as you would like. The motor will overheat very quickly. So not only do you lose mechanical advantage, they can get very warm very quickly.
Scott Walter · 00:33:16
And that’s a challenge. So the difference between Wuji, which is direct hand, and Sharpa, which is direct hand: Sharpa is going straight to the joints. And Wuji is doing it there. They still are putting some down here in the palm, but they have such good control of the fingers and the positions of them that their sim-to-real gap is almost zero. So every research lab wants to use them because the sim-to-real gap is gone, whereas with tendon-based hands, there’s still a lot of finagling. It’s still very challenging to do that. And that’s let’s say, their major advantage.
Scott Walter · 00:33:48
And then everyone will point out like all these other advantages. And that’s why you have these different camps that are arguing at each other of I can solve this problem. And then they’ll point out, yeah, but you can’t solve that one. And you don’t have the perfect hand yet as a result.
00:34:00 — Counting degrees of freedom and scaling hands
Michelle Sun · 00:34:00
Yeah, and Sharpa is the one that even the pinky has an extra degree of freedom, right? Is that what you’re just doing?
Scott Walter · 00:34:09
Yeah. That’s what they call the fifth metacarpals. Ask 10 biomechanists how many degrees of freedom the human hand has, and you’ll get 20 answers. Definitely. I’ve researched this. You’ll hear some people say that there’s 27 degrees of freedom in the hand. No. Now, someone who says that is probably a gamer who has a hand avatar in their gaming system with their VR and are counting the first six degrees of freedom, which is the position of your wrist and orientation in space, and with the hand DOFs. It’s like: that doesn’t belong there. So if you take that away, it means you’re getting down to maybe 21 degrees of freedom.
Scott Walter · 00:34:46
Some people might say there’s 22, depending upon the metacarpal. And what that means is that we need to do something called opposition. And that is our thumb being able to oppose other fingers and also doing it over on the pinky. And when it comes to the pinky, it turns out our pinky can kind of swing over because we have what they call this metacarpal bone down here that actually has a joint down there. And it can kind of swing over a little bit, as well as the fourth can a little bit. So there’s some arguments on whether you need both in there.
Scott Walter · 00:35:14
And that’s why you start getting into this, how many degrees of freedom that it has in there. And you can argue any number you want, but generally it’s considered to be somewhere between 20 and 22, whether you want to do that. When it comes to two degrees of freedom, I’ve heard approximately 20. And you’re like: how can they say approximately? It either is or isn’t because it’s integer, right? And it’s like: no, it turns out if you take your thumb and move your thumb, you’ll notice that none of your fingers move. If you take your index finger and move it, you’ll notice no other fingers move until you get to a point that suddenly the other one starts moving down there and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
Scott Walter · 00:35:46
So that means there’s a loss of independence between them. And that means they start having fractional degrees of freedom. And when you add them all up, it’s something like 29.75 or something or 19.75. It’s a weird number. Now, the Sharpa hand and the Wuji hand have absolutely no coupling between them. So they are truly independent. They can move any one of their joints independent of any other. Tendon-based hands, they actually do have some crosstalk, apart from the movement of here and like another tendon’s rubbing up against another tendon. If it pulls on it, it’s possible.
Scott Walter · 00:36:18
So there is not full degrees of control as you think there’s a lot, but there’s still some subtlety that you have to tease out in your control algorithms to make sure you get your finger position where you want to have. And again, I’m devolving everything here. I would say one of the most interesting hand designs I saw recently was like a 1.3 meter hand. So I’m going to make this giant hand. And he made it like the Sharpa hand in a way, and that each joint was a big actuator. And when you get up to that scale, it makes total sense because you can size it in a way that it does not overwhelm the size of your design because you can get incredible torque density when you start scaling up.
Scott Walter · 00:36:54
And so a tendon-based hand almost doesn’t make sense when you make them big. So if you want to have like this big giant sculpture thing, just build them like a robot arm and don’t worry about doing tendon drives or anything like that or cable drives or anything like that. Well, the only alternative might be like a hydraulic-based hand because hydraulics are great when you start scaling up, like in excavators. And you can kind of fit them in there that suddenly they’re not dominating the size of whatever it is you have. When you start scaling down, suddenly your hydraulic pumps and everything become massive compared to what it is you’re trying to move.
Scott Walter · 00:37:29
So you can kind of look at it that way. And what ends up happening is as you scale down, unfortunately, the torque density just doesn’t go down the way you want, which is why you have to start considering something like a tendon-based hand versus direct drive at human scale. And it’s like right there, right at that point. If you went way smaller, really, really small to the micro level, Maybe direct drive makes sense. But kind of there’s like an area in there which you might say, yeah, remote actuation is the only way to do it.
Scott Walter · 00:38:01
And it seems like tendons make sense at that point, not so much hydraulics as you get bigger. Okay. This is more like chapters one and two as opposed to a very simple prologue of what you want to talk about.
00:38:14 — Allonic — braided hands and portfolio disclosure
Michelle Sun · 00:38:14
Yeah. Well, do you want to dive into Allonic? I think this is a really good segue to when you mentioned—I need to look up the 1.3 meter hand. And whenever we design something, I think designing for the extreme always teaches us something unexpected, right? So that’s why I want to dive into three different extreme designs that we don’t see a lot and they are very surprising. And maybe you can share what it teaches us in terms of a new perspective and what’s possible. So Allonic—you told me about it, actually. Tell me more.
Scott Walter · 00:38:48
First thing we want to do is that we’re talking about a lot of different hands and a lot of different hand companies. And Allonic is like the only one we’ll be talking about, which is actually in the RoboStrategy portfolio. And so I just want to put that out there, full disclosure. This is a RoboStrategy company and it’s a very unique design. As you can see, it’s a tendon-based design, but it’s a little bit different than your standard tendon-based designs. And that is that almost everyone is trying to figure out how to build a joint mechanically.
Scott Walter · 00:39:19
And they make a little tiny door hinge and they’ll have a tendon going on there that’s pulling it to open and close. And a lot of people have been studying different ways of being able to do that including Tesla was trying to come up with a novel way that they seem to have abandoned and gone back to the same thing that everyone’s just going to make a simple pin joint with a tendon there. Now, if you look at the human body, there’s only really one joint, which we can see a true mechanical analog to, and that is like our shoulder joint and our hip joints, which is a ball and socket joint.
Scott Walter · 00:39:51
Look at it and go, oh, that’s just, just like saying. But we’re all familiar with a door hinge. You look at the human body and I think even biology in general, I don’t think you will actually find biology having coming up with what you consider a pure door hinge. But there’s an analog in the way they work and that they have what’s called a rolling contact joint. They move around like that and the constraints are such that you can emulate it very easily with a door hinge or what we would call a pin joint or a cylindrical joint, just like that.
Scott Walter · 00:40:18
But the reality is it functions very different. So, again, when we go to degrees of freedom, I could argue that your IP joint has six degrees of freedom. You’d be huh, what? Well, the dominant one is in this direction, but it does have a little bit of wiggle in a bunch of different directions. And our body tries really hard to make sure there’s only one dominant direction. And a door hinge does a very good job of like eliminating all the other kind of motions, though it still has a little bit of slop depending on how tight it is there.
Scott Walter · 00:40:50
But the thing is, the door hinges mechanically lock it in to make sure that doesn’t move around. Now, if I have two things that are just doing rolling contact like that how do I keep it together? How do I keep it from falling apart? And the way the human body does it is we have these things called ligaments. So basically just imagine you get a bunch of rubber bands that are holding it on in there that will allow it to stretch. But you get the rubber bands in such a way that if you try doing that it just pops you right back in there.
Scott Walter · 00:41:17
But it’s a line that will allow you to do that very easily. And then you use tendons to do the actuation. So, what’s the difference between a ligament and a tendon? A tendon is basically muscle to bone attachment. And a ligament is basically bone to bone. And so you have that in there and they’re allowed to stretch a little bit. And what’s kind of great is that they act as spring sometimes. It’ll help pop everything in there. So, the human body has figured out how to do it in a miraculous way. And there’s also a little bit of a saddle joint in there to help keep a little bit of movement this way.
Scott Walter · 00:41:48
So, what Allonic has been trying to do is solve a couple of problems. We talked about tendon wear, right? The tendons wear out. And they fray all the time. Well, wait a minute. It’s like: us humans, we’re tendons. And we don’t seem to have that problem. And it’s like: we actually do because we have this thing called sleep. And when we sleep at night, our body is like regenerating and fixing everything that’s damaged. So, if you build like a tendon-based hand, you’re going to have a maintenance schedule. Every now and then, you’re going to have to replace the tendons.
Scott Walter · 00:42:20
Now, we don’t replace the tendons. We are able to miraculously repair the tendons. And if you really want to do the comparison, we want robots to go 24-7. And if we say, ah, the robots can’t go 24-7. The tendons are everywhere. We can go 24-7. Like, no, we don’t. It’s like: we work an eight-hour shift, and we’re exhausted. And if we continue to work eight-hour shifts nonstop, our tendons will fray and break. They need a break. And sometimes, they need a weekend or more. And if you’re not careful, you need surgery. And sometimes, you’ll have these cases that they never solve, that will end up having something with their carpal tunnel syndrome or something like that.
Scott Walter · 00:43:03
Or if they’ve ever had tendonitis. No, it takes a while. So we also have to be very careful how we play with the use of our tendons to keep everything nominal. So think about, a surgeon is known for his hands, right? That if they’re smart as he is, it’s all about his hands. And surgeons are not bricklayers. They will not do that. Because if they go out and start becoming bricklayers, they will lose their surgical skills in a way because they are stressing their mechanical components in a way that is just not going to work long term.
Scott Walter · 00:43:37
Okay, so what’s kind of the idea here with Allonic? Well, rather than repairing your hand, what do you imagine if you just dispose it and replace it again? Because a lot of times, it’s a question of cost. So when we are doing any sort of work, we put on consumables, gloves, to protect our hands. And then at some point that we’re out and we dispose of them, we put them on there because it’s cheaper to do that than expect our skin to repair itself all the time. And so, a lot of times the cost in a hand is where the actuation is.
Scott Walter · 00:44:07
It may not necessarily be out there. So the big problem with most hands is, you want to have them be dexterous, you want to have them be robust, and you want to have them be cheap. And it’s really hard to have all three. So the idea of Allonic is to go ahead and actually make them cheap by using traditional braiding technology. Now, we take our textiles for granted, but these machines are amazing. What they can do when it comes to any sort of textile, whatever they have come up with, that can just weave things so quickly in any sort of design.
Scott Walter · 00:44:41
We’ve seen embroidery and stuff like that. These machines can just do, right out there. And they recognize the same thing. It’s like: by using braiding technology that’s usually used to make ropes, they can also make fingers. And that part of it is that they do have a stiff member in there, which is a simple 3D-printed bone. So you feed the bone into the braiding machine, put these things around there, and you can determine from the pattern, and you can put in different fibers. So you can have, thicker or stronger or different kinds of fibers woven in there.
Scott Walter · 00:45:13
In some cases, you’ll see they do have, a different color fiber in there just to kind of prove you can do that. And that means you can start weaving all the complexity that would normally be very hard to assemble mechanically. And so it’s like: oh, certain kind of tendons, we can go ahead and do that. Oh, we need a couple ligaments here. Oh, I’ll put them in. What material do you want? So it doesn’t have to all be Dyneema. It could be cotton threads. It could be nylon threads. Whatever you want, which will give you the strength you want, give you the capability, the compliance you want in some places.
Scott Walter · 00:45:44
And the other thing, the difference between this hand and all the other hands I’ve had is that it feels kind of warm and comfortable. It’s soft. Everyone else’s hands are metallic or they’re plastic. And in many cases, their compliance they build in by putting a layer over it. So you can put a glove on it that makes your metal hand feel softer, but it still feels a little bit metallic. And so this, when it comes to actually coming into contact with people, will feel more human-like than many of those designs. So that’s the other thing that’s, super attractive about it and that they could just knock these things out really quickly.
Scott Walter · 00:46:22
And as a result of being able to do that you don’t care about the fact that your hand wore out. You just replace it because it now becomes a consumable that’s on the order of magnitude of maybe the normal kind of consumables you have.
00:46:37 — Allonic — cost, maintenance, and control
Michelle Sun · 00:46:37
So that’s definitely a very different approach. And you mentioned that there’s this trade-off triangle of robustness and dexterity. What’s the third? The cost, right? So this one, what is the BOM cost for this? And what do they sell it for?
Scott Walter · 00:46:57
So the BOM cost will probably be in the order of $100. So when they finally get the scale, this is going to be remarkably cheap. Who knows? It could be less than that. You’d love to really get it down the cost of gloves. I know some gloves are pennies, right? It takes gloves people throw on. There are other gloves in the order of a couple of dollars. So it’ll still be a little bit more. But in the grand scheme of things, if you can get a couple of weeks of wear out of this, it doesn’t matter.
Scott Walter · 00:47:23
And it depends on your application. It could be that this is going to last very, very long. But if you put it in a very dirty environment, or something where you’re very, very aggressive with it, it could be something that wears out very quickly. But at the same time, if you’re in an environment that has a lot of grit and everything, chances are the protective gear that the people are wearing is also very expensive. And it’s just so different and unique of everything else. There’s still challenges: how do you control this thing? Because it’s tendon-based.
Scott Walter · 00:47:54
But everyone is sort of getting over and around how to figure to do it. Because with enough ML, I think you can solve these problems. Everyone’s trying to simulate how their tendons are going to work. And figuring out everything to get a heuristic kind of control of it. And my feeling is, I think if you just start collecting enough data, enough ML data, your neural net will just know what to do. Just like we do. We know exactly how to manipulate our hands without even consciously thinking about it. And we’re not simulating or trying to model this with mathematics.
Scott Walter · 00:48:34
So sometimes engineers overthink it. And this is what I’ve always seen as the power of ML. If we just get enough episodes and just train it and everything, that will be the solution rather than saying, I have to have the super high-fidelity model to be able to control it. And Allonic, they’ve come out of stealth. They’re still in the startup phase. They have a lot of samples. We’re kind of bullish on them for that particular reason. But again, full disclosure, I might be a little bit biased here. Take everything with a grain of salt.
00:49:03 — Different designs for different applications
Michelle Sun · 00:49:03
Yeah, thank you. So this is a really great first look at a very different design. And one of the things that also stood out to me is that we may need different designs for different use cases, right? So for Allonic, it’s disposable, almost like a glove, high-use environment. And it may be for scenarios that are not really precise. Precision is not super needed. It’s like: oh, picking up things and things like pushing the cart around. And so maybe that tendon-based sim-to-real gap is not as much of a deployment blockage.
Scott Walter · 00:49:46
And just to point out, I’ve been looking at so many different ones, and everyone asks, well, which side of the fence are you on? And I’ve jokingly called you’ve got the tendonistas on one side and the drive cells on the other. Where am I? And I’m like: I think the TAM is so big and the application space is so big, they’re all going to win in particular niches. They will kind of self-select to the applications that they’re best suited for, and they will thrive in that very well. Because we have yet to figure out the hand that rules all hands.
Scott Walter · 00:50:17
We haven’t collected all the infinity stones yet when it comes to being able to come up with that. So you’re absolutely right, Michelle, that you’re going to see that tendon-based hands just make sense in certain applications and direct drive and other stuff like that. And the two sides will constantly argue over who has the best. But in the end, the customers will decide and they’ll find the applications and they’ll go in there and they’ll be very well. So that’s why I’m kind of bullish on that whole sector in a way is that they all will be able to find traction where it’s needed.
Scott Walter · 00:50:48
And then everyone’s like: oh, that’s a cop-out. It’s like: come on, choose one or the other. And it’s like: no, the reality is I think you don’t have to choose one. You only have to choose one if you decide to build your own hand. And then it turns out there’s a bunch of companies over in China that have like four or five different versions of hands that are all of the above because they also recognize the same thing. And then there are the others that are just like doubling down this is the only way forward and we want to put all our effort in.
00:51:15 — Daxo — up to 120 tendons
Scott Walter · 00:51:15
So the Daxo is really cool. Everyone argues over tendons and how many you need. And Tom Zhang is like: the more the merrier. In this case, I think he’s got up to 120 tendons. And then he thinks the more tendons makes it actually better. And he talks about it being more like infinite degrees of freedom, actually tendons and motors. So he actually has that many motors. They’re very small motors and he’s able to actually fit them in a space that’s about the size of a little bit bigger, kind of Popeye, but he’s able to get the form factor down there.
Scott Walter · 00:51:58
And he’s got so many tendons that he’s got a completely different control algorithm. Now, this was his first generation hand. And as you can see, it’s extremely flexible. I call it almost like sausage hands that there’s no clear kind of IP joint or it has way more IP joints than we’re used to. And that means as far as gestures and everything can do, it can do way more than a human hand can. And that was his first version. His second version, he actually has something that looks more like a human hand as far as IP joints going in there.
Scott Walter · 00:52:32
And Tom knows a lot about human anatomy and stuff like that. So he’s taken biomechanics. He’s also had like a startup that was working on a type of mechanical human hand. So he understands everything very well in the traditional approaches and was trying this other approach. And now he has sort of the normal number of joints. But again, he’s completely overactuated as far as the number of tendons. And what could be the potential advantage? Why would you even want to do that? Well, the human body actually has more tendons than everyone else is doing. So we think of that we have like a flexure and an extensure.
Scott Walter · 00:53:09
So Tesla did not have an extensor at first. They use a spring return. Now they’re putting one in there and they have two abductors in there. They were at first three. Now it looks like they’re going to be four and many others are four tendons per finger. Well, we actually have more than that in human anatomy. We also have these intrinsics internally that help us with the subtle control and movement. But we have more than one flexure anyways for grip strength and everything else. So looking at that well, wait a minute, maybe the more the merrier.
Scott Walter · 00:53:37
Because the more tendons you have, the more grip strength you can get when you need it. Because rather than having one actuator trying to pull on that finger, I can have multiple pulling on that. The other thing is that you have way more kind of weird combinations. So what a lot of people have been trying to do with the abduction is basically keep their cake and eat it too. It’s like they have two tendons because you need the two tendons for abduction. One pulling this way and one pulling that way. And then they’re running kind of a flexure through here.
Scott Walter · 00:54:10
But rather than having that flexure move this joint, they route it in such a way that it only does the PIP and the DIP. And what ends up happening is that if you pull both abductors at the same time, you don’t get ab or adduction. It actually forces you to get flexion. And that’s like a real clever thing. It’s like: oh, look, we can get this two for one here. And if I only pull on one, I get this and that. The problem with that is you actually lose a little bit of control of where it is, which is why you actually need an active extensor back there to give you the antagonism you need to put it in there.
Scott Walter · 00:54:40
And the way I want you to understand what’s happening here is that a lot of people are familiar with horseback riding. And you have reins on a horse and those leather reins are just like tendons. They pull, they work in one direction, but when you relax it, you can’t push it, right? You can kind of put it out there, but the horse is not going to feel that it’s only going to feel tension this way or that way. And we all know to make the horse turn its head this way or that way, we just have to pull on the rein this way or that way and how to return it.
Scott Walter · 00:55:09
And I want you to think of that just as abduction back and forth, back and forth. You can do that.
Michelle Sun · 00:55:14
So it’s like a pulley—there’s two.
Scott Walter · 00:55:19
It’s a pulley mechanism. Exactly. But only one of them actually controls and the other you just release to make sure you’re not putting the tension back. Now, if I pull on both reins at the same time, the horse’s head can’t go left and right. There’s only one thing you can do and that is it has to come back up. So that would be like getting in flexion. So you look at that and say, look, I get all the control I want. I can put the horse’s head wherever I want. If the horse is cooperating, what if the horse is like upset and it’s just like moving its head around?
Scott Walter · 00:55:49
Suddenly you realize you don’t have degrees of control to keep it where you want to because it’s fighting you. It’s bucking against everything you’re doing. And so what’s that got to do with fingers? Well, what happens when fingers come in contact with something? As soon as it comes in contact, I have to resist that. Otherwise, my finger is going to go. I want my finger to stay there. Well, as soon as I do that and start fighting that thing, suddenly I am inducing another movement somewhere that’s very hard for me to control because with just horse’s reins, I don’t have enough degrees of control.
Scott Walter · 00:56:17
You would have to actually add something else in there to be able to do that to give you that kind of stability. And these are the problems with minimizing the number you have. Now, if you go overboard and you put tons of them on there, suddenly not only can you get extra strength you want, you can get the stiffness when you need to have, and also different degrees of control because he’s got enough going to each group that he can move each pinky or each IP joint independent of another, which is something that’s very difficult to do when you have a minimum number in there.
Scott Walter · 00:56:49
It’s like you get that coupling that’s very hard to do. Now, most people can’t do it. Common’s an unusual person that I keep on saying, yeah, but people, can’t, you get this coupling and suddenly he’ll show me he can do it. I’m like: I don’t know how he does it, but he’s got like control of his fingers in a way that most people don’t.
00:57:07 — Daxo — grip strength, sensing, and proprioception
Michelle Sun · 00:57:07
But what kind of use case do you think this unlocks? Like this kind of hand can do that other hands that are less actuated cannot do?
Scott Walter · 00:57:16
Okay. Potentially, it could give you a lot more grip strength, which is the problem that everyone talks about is ah, we’re kind of lacking the grip strength, kind of dexterous control, resistance to force. But the other thing that’s rather interesting in here, and this is where it comes to ML, is that a lot of fingers, we’re trying to figure out how to get tactile sensing in there. Because this is something we haven’t really talked about is we’ve got all these movements. What about the tactile? It’s like: oh, that’s another episode. But it would be nice to kind of know where the touch is.
Scott Walter · 00:57:47
And there’s ways of doing haptics or sensing. One of them is that we actually have like the pressure sensors that we can feel something, which is amazing. But we also have this other kind of sense of where our fingers are, which is known as like proprioception. And we can also feel pressure and resistance that isn’t necessarily being felt through our fingertips, but we can kind of feel it in our forearms. So a lot of times, you’ll notice if you push on something like that you might notice that something in your forearm is tensioning up a little bit.
Scott Walter · 00:58:18
You can feel the touch there. So if you were to actually numb your fingers so that you can’t feel anything, you will notice you can still tell when you come into contact with something because that your forearm goes into tension. So that means there’s data out there about the contact you’re coming within. And it’s very, low quality signal, but it’s still signal and information. The other thing that all the tendon-based hands have, and this is a problem with the Tesla is because if you kind of go back to the Tesla image, you’ll notice there was like a lot of blinking lights and other things that were in there.
Scott Walter · 00:58:50
And you might want to know, what’s that all about? You see those green lights in there? Well, the problem again with a tendon-based hand is as it moves and comes into contact with something, I now have no idea what the angle of my joints are. With the direct drive guys, they know exactly. They can basically count revolutions on their fingers and they know where they are. They don’t actually need to have a decoder. I think they may have some built in there for some kind of redundancy. But the tendon-based ones, it’s like you’ve got no choice.
Scott Walter · 00:59:18
If you want to know where it is, you need some sort of feedback to be able to do that, which means ideally you’d like to do it just by measuring the tendon length or how much your actuator down here rotated. But the reality is, that’s kind of a guess on where it is, but the reality is it might be somewhere else and you want to know how to compensate it. Well, one way is I guess I just kind of look at it and estimate the angle. But in many cases, they need to actually have sensors there.
Scott Walter · 00:59:44
And a lot of those LEDs you’re seeing in there is because they have encoders built in there. And that’s basically the signal that lets it’s there and operating. I’m assuming the full-blown one won’t have that. So suddenly you’re having to build additional electronics. And like that means not only are you routing tendons, you’re routing wires through there and all these other things that kind of know what’s going on. It’s like: oh, so now I’ve got additional stuff that has to go there. So what Tom’s doing here is that he is able to tell that when you come in contact with something, that all the tendons, it’s basically kind of this idea of a tensegrity, that all of them suddenly feel attention and are reacting to that structure.
Scott Walter · 01:00:27
And the reaction to that structure, he’s feeling down here in the forearm because he has 120 motors down there. And those motors are set up that they have extremely good torque transparency. And he’s able to say, oh, this tendon, that tendon, they’re all feeling a certain force on here. And he runs this experiment enough times. Now, if you ask me to sit down and write the algorithm for that I would have absolutely no idea how to model. It’s a very difficult thing to model. Tom’s like: oh, we just run enough experiments and we know. And so he’s got it to the point that he can come up and he can touch his finger somewhere.
Scott Walter · 01:01:01
And he knows exactly where the point of contact is based on everything that’s down there because he has so much overactuated everything. So his philosophy there is that there are so many other things we can gain from doing it. Strength, cool proprioception that’s better than anyone else.
01:01:17 — Tacta — measuring how workers use their fingers
Michelle Sun · 01:01:17
Very cool. And I love that Daxo is taking the approach of maximalism, right? Let’s get as many actuators in there, as many tendons in there. And then the third example that we have is actually the opposite approach: let’s think about whether we even need five fingers. In fact, a lot of people that I’ve talked to talked about how many DOFs are really needed to handle like 90% of the tasks that humans actually do. It’s actually way less than 22 DOFs. So it seems like Tacta is an example that we can talk about also where they have five fingers, but then their launch actually showed.
Scott Walter · 01:02:03
They went along with that assumption. And again, there’s this huge academic debate over how many fingers you need and stuff like that. A lot of people like to weigh in on X about this all the time and say, well, I can do these things with three fingers and why do I need four and everything else? And again, there have been some academic studies showing that and most of the pushback they see from people is you can do a lot with three fingers and you kind of start getting out to your parade or frontiers that there’s still others that you need to have the other, have it.
Scott Walter · 01:02:36
So a lot of times it is very academic, but what Tacta did is they said let’s settle this debate and actually start measuring data with five finger gloves and they measured it from real workers in doing real tasks. So not some lab where they’re pretending to do stuff, but they actually suited up real people with a lot of tasks and they were surprised themselves to find out that the last two digits seem to be going along for the ride most of the time. And that meant that they believe that they can take over everything with just a three-fingered hand, because the others aren’t needed and they won’t have to worry too much about the body gap.
Scott Walter · 01:03:14
Now, some people say, ah, you really can’t do that. And part of the reason why we have five fingers is fatigue is that in order to generate the grip strength and everything, a lot of times we need those five finger hands. So many cases, the five fingers come in there more for a reason out of fatigue, not necessarily dexterity. And they realize this is our fingers don’t get tired and we can apply a little bit more force. So that’s why they’re able to say that they can get away without the index finger and without the pinky for that reason.
01:03:44 — Tacta — fluidic actuation and industrial arms
Scott Walter · 01:03:44
Now, Tacta is a lot of things. So the first thing is, I think they were kind of sitting there looking at the arguments and the mudslinging and everything going on between the two sides of people who are pro tendons and people who pro direct drive. And they’re like: maybe there’s a third way, a different way of being able to do the actuation. There’s kind of a hybrid between the two and they use something called fluidic tendons. And it’s a little bit like hydraulics and hydraulics have been used before. So, for instance, Clone is using hydraulics.
Scott Walter · 01:04:14
Sanctuary has done that. And the big question is: what’s the difference between hydraulics and fluidic? Well, usually with hydraulics you have one pressure source that creates a pressure and you have these micro valves that are able to open and close very quickly to be able to sort of let the hydraulic fluid in or out. And you can almost think of those as tiny actuators, but it’s more or less like open and close and figuring out how to do that really rapidly. So that’s been the trick that both Clone and Sanctuary, they have patents for things like that.
Scott Walter · 01:04:44
The other is that rather than having one single reservoir with these things that open up, why don’t you just have a syringe mechanism? So we all know how a syringe works, being able to bring up a fluid or to push it out. And so you just have a fluid and you have that actuated and you just push on it as necessary. And it also gives you a lot of control.
Michelle Sun · 01:05:02
Are the fluids currently in the palm area or where do you see it right now in this diagram? Well, in the forum.
Scott Walter · 01:05:10
Okay. So it is backed out somewhere else. So there’s a much bigger base. It’s not even in the forum, it’s in a base, but they’re going to be scaling it down. So right now it’s kind of bulky and it’s really meant to go onto a cobot. So this is the other thing. A lot of people talk about the humanoid distraction when you’re building a hand. A lot of people are trying to build a hand to go on the humanoid. And when you do that you have to do all these things. It constrains you so much on the size and the power and the weight and everything else.
Scott Walter · 01:05:36
But there’s all these robotic applications out there that just need a hand. They don’t have to be in a humanoid form. So we’re like cobots, industrial arms and stuff like that. There’s a lot of applications. If they had something like a human hand would be able to do a lot of it. And they’re not the only ones that have noticed that. Mimic has noticed that. Kyber has noticed that you can go down the list of some others. Like, wait a minute, let’s not worry about this distraction, the humanoid distraction and think about what would happen if we put it on a real robotic arm, which is already certified.
Scott Walter · 01:06:07
They have great precision. They already have a programmatic interface. We can source them really easy. Let’s do that. So that’s how they’re looking at that. And they’re not worried about how this is going to get onto an Optimus. They’re not trying to sell it to Optimus or to Tesla or to Figure or anyone else. They’re like: no, this is going to be going to other people. And they’re trying to solve that at hand problem. And the way they’ve done it is basically a kind of a cross between trying to be a bit direct drive and also be tendon-based.
Scott Walter · 01:06:37
And that instead of using tendons, they’re using a fluid to replace the tendons. And they’re using a tube, which you could argue is kind of like a Bowden tube in a way. So a lot of the routing is again done with these tube structures that will be able to go around but you can then have a wrist without the problem. Because again, if you’re having a tube going around there, you don’t have to worry about the length changing. And the fact that they have a fluid in there, the fluid doesn’t really care about length. It just cares about pressure.
Scott Walter · 01:07:03
And you can sense the pressure really quickly and react to that. So a lot of very interesting things about this hand design are using a different way of doing actuation.
01:07:12 — Tacta — gloves, data collection, and tactile sensing
Scott Walter · 01:07:12
But as you’ll see, Tacta is like kind of many companies in a way because it’s not just the hand and a few others are beginning to realize you need what literally is like hand in glove, right? You need to capture data. And there’s always this embodiment gap that everyone’s trying to figure out. Well, now how do I collect the data? Do I go egoistic, this and that and everything else. And a lot of times that’s not good enough. Do I go with an UMI glove? How do I do the mapping or retargeting from what my hands like?
Scott Walter · 01:07:42
Wouldn’t it be great if I could just slip this hand onto my hand and collect data with it? That’s the ultimate embodiment and or the ultimate kind of UMI. And they have a glove, which is very similar to the hand as far as the mechanical movement. And as far as the touch sensing, because that’s the one mode everyone says like with egocentric data, you can capture the movements, but you can’t capture the actual tactile feel.
Michelle Sun · 01:08:10
Is that the glove that you’re referring to on the screen?
Scott Walter · 01:08:13
Yep. So they have a glove, which is able to pick it up. And when they’re doing that they are also capturing what the tip sensors are going to feel. Now, the sensors they have all over, they came up with a way of being able to mass produce very high precision and high density taxels. So these are basically tactile cells. Think of them like the way we think of pixels or voxels, except for touch. And they have them in all the key locations, including the palm. So they know what it’s like to grab something. And I’m pretty much of that feeling that the data collection we have to do has to have a lot of modes and that a lot of the data, if it doesn’t have some sort of touch or force feedback, the data will be a very low quality.
Scott Walter · 01:09:03
It’s still usable. But what it means is you probably need a much larger data sets to be able to overcome that deficit. But if you can actually capture that mode right away, you’re way ahead of the game, way ahead. So they already were the philosophy. It’s like: we’re not just going to build a hand. We have to build the data collection thing to go with it. And we’re not just building a hand. We’re also building really good touch sensors that are going to be in there. So that’s some other part of the IP. That’s very interesting approach.
Scott Walter · 01:09:30
So it’s like the full stack of the hand in a way. And they’re also having to build the model that goes on top of it. So very serious company based in Palo Alto, actually just down the road from where the Tesla headquarters is. And when I visited them last week, I was really quite impressed with the operation that they have there. The number of engineers that they have, the equipment that they have in there is just wow, these guys, they kind of know what they’re doing.
01:10:00 — Tactile response rates and sensitivity
Michelle Sun · 01:10:00
Yeah. And one of the things that you talked about, the touch sensor part, I read that they have 400 hertz, right? So I think a lot of the numbers that I’m seeing is more than like the 50, 100 hertz. What does the 400 hertz unlock versus a lower number?
Scott Walter · 01:10:18
Yeah, that’s very important. We always hear these numbers that humans are able to react in like a 10th of a second. And I know that from like track and field, because they always said that it takes a 10th of a second for the runner to react to the sound of the gun. And that’s how they actually tell a false start, believe it or not, is that when the gun goes off, if the pressure that’s on there happens before a 10th of a second, it’s considered a false start, which is rather amazing, which means you cannot anticipate.
Scott Walter · 01:10:47
So it’s kind of based on human reflexes. And we always think about that. And a lot of times the update rates, I think our vision systems update also somewhere around 30 hertz, maybe it might be technically 20, but I think it’s considered somewhere around there. So everyone’s always built to that. And the assumption is that’s human reaction speed. But it turns out our touch sensing is incredibly reactive and it’s closer to a thousand hertz. So we’re getting a lot of information really quick. And it seems a lot of that is not so much going all the way back up to our brain, but it’s more like reflex action that we have.
Scott Walter · 01:11:23
So we have a lot of kind of edge compute or neural compute built into our hands and our reflexes. So you notice if you touch something sharp, you react way before you’re aware of it or something hot, and that’s because we are able to sense very quickly and they’re trying to get it down to that human scale level. The other thing they’ve done is that they can actually sense pressures that are a quarter of what humans can sense. So it’s even way more sensitive as well as way up on the high end. And as with a lot of instrumentation, either an instrument is really good at something fine or it’s really good at something big and it’s hard to get the two to be able to do both and they’re able to change.
Scott Walter · 01:12:05
That’s impressive. So they’re trying to get down to those levels. And that was new information to me, that there’s actually part of the human nervous system that is able to react faster than 100 hertz in the order of a kilohertz is amazing.
01:12:19 — Industrial use cases and customer discovery
Michelle Sun · 01:12:19
And one of the things that I’m trying to reconcile is that it’s really great that Tacta is tackling the hand space in a more deployment-centric view. Right. So instead of thinking to sell to humanoids, actually, why not? We just build a habit for the COBOS systems and go to the industrial setting. So in terms of this very fast tactile response and also sensing different pressure in a very precise way, what is the use case in an industrial setting? I get that at a home setting, if I touch something really hot, then I want to react.
Michelle Sun · 01:13:01
But in an industrial setting, what are some use cases that will be very useful?
Scott Walter · 01:13:11
They’re all sorts. The one use case I see coming up again and again and again is data centers and cabling and tables and data centers. And like they’ve probably had to plug in like an internet cable in the back of a laptop or something like that. Data centers are like that but on steroids and slightly different kinds of connectors. And a lot of times knowing when a connector is getting it in requires sometimes a lot of finesse because sometimes you can’t see it. So you have to be able to kind of react, tell from the field.
Scott Walter · 01:13:39
And then when it clicks in, know that you’ve got the right kind of click. So we are very good at doing that. And with the scale up of data centers, everyone is looking at trying to automate that. So that’s like kind of one example. You also have just like a lot of assembly, like consumer electronics and stuff like that. The finesse that kind of goes on. And then it turns out, see, this is the other thing that Tacta is able to do with their fluidic gloves. They can actually make smaller size hands. Most of the other hands, they’re bigger than most human hands.
Scott Walter · 01:14:11
So when I put my hand up there, it’s like the size of my hand. A lot of people complain about the size of my hand and higher. And in China, in a lot of electronics assemblies, most of the people who are working there are women. And a lot of times they’re there because they’re petite and their hands are much smaller at that scale that actually allows them to do it. I would have difficult time because my hands are both thumbs, kind of what it comes down to. And so they can actually scale it down to the size that will allow them to do that.
Scott Walter · 01:14:40
A lot of these very precise motions that are just very hard to automate in general. And again, what they’re seeing is that a lot of these assembly plants are people sitting at their desk. And all they’re doing is moving their arms. You don’t need the legs and you barely need a torso, but you need this fine dexterity control that’s out there. And the equipment is already there. It’s like: oh, they grab this tool. They go ahead and do that. They grab something else and be able to go. So they’re finding that. And this is what I encourage all entrepreneurs out there.
Scott Walter · 01:15:11
And I’m seeing a lot of them that are more like that. Actually get out to the deployment phase early. I would say even pre-deployment. Going out, meet your customers, find out what their needs are, and then design everything around that. And you will definitely be more successful way sooner than everyone else. If you’re sitting in a lab, everything looks great. And then you go to deploy. And then suddenly you’re discovering all sorts of things you did not know were going to be problems. And now you have to go back and redo it. So find your customers.
Scott Walter · 01:15:42
I’ve met a couple entrepreneurs, and it’s just great. They literally just go on a field trip. Someone will just pack up the car and drive around and just knock on doors of all these different like small companies to find out what they’re doing, what their manufacturing challenges are. And some cases find, the manager that’s there or the owner being really excited about, yeah, we’ve been wanting to automate this thing over here. These are the challenges, the problems, and the guys learn about it. And then they go back and they build something and then they get traction.
Scott Walter · 01:16:09
That’s the way it’s going to be. The TAM is so big. Don’t worry about building hands for humanoids. I am very pro-humanoid. It’s going to be there. But I don’t take the side that it’s going to be special purpose versus general purpose. There’s a huge spectrum in between there and that you’re going to need both because there’s just so many applications out there. And if you try to get kind of dogmatic that only one side is going to work and you think you’re going to dominate the whole thing, no, no, no, stay full.
Scott Walter · 01:16:44
That is the biggest pie we’ve ever seen, ever, trying to automate labor. And the tiniest sliver of that pie will keep you satisfied for your entire life. You won’t be able to eat that piece of pie. Let’s just put it that way.
01:17:04 — General-purpose bodies, specialized work
Michelle Sun · 01:17:04
Exactly. And if we think about humans, right, we’re general purpose, but we also have different professions. So a surgeon is different from an assembly worker. The skills, they’re all precision-type skills, but it’s a very different type of expertise as well. And the part that you mentioned really going out to the field and the deployment site, like it was really so true where when I visited factories in Shenzhen, I’m like: wow, these people, they literally sit there for 12 hours a day and they like have a basket on top of them. And then they move things and assemble and then move it to another basket.
Michelle Sun · 01:17:39
And so they really only get up to use the bathroom or get a sip of water. And so I think these are the insights that makers like Tacta would think about: hey, if we really want to be useful, maybe put the energy to make a really sensitive tactile sensing system. And then a very dexterous hand, and maybe think about how the movement is not as important as sometimes we want to think of.
Scott Walter · 01:18:05
Yeah. And the other thing to kind of point out is, this argument about, one humanoid can do everything. It’s like kind of the humanoid form factor can, but we’re going to see different versions of it for good reasons. And that is, we know, they’re different sized people and some of them excel in certain areas and others just because they’re a little bit taller, they’re a little bit smaller. Look at the Olympic Games. Gymnasts tend to be on the short side. Basketball players tend to be on the tall side. And a lot of it’s just physics.
Scott Walter · 01:18:41
If you’re tall, it’s really hard to do cartwheels. I can tell you that I cannot do a cartwheel. Okay. I am jealous of all these people I’ve seen doing cartwheels. So you’ll see these different embodiments make sense. And a lot of times it’s just that again, a surgeon kind of follows a certain path and that it may be that because they decided to not be a bricklayer, they have the hands to be a surgeon. But if they had made that choice earlier in life, they wouldn’t be able to be a surgeon because they’ve just kind of lost that finesse that you need.
01:19:17 — Why the next five years might be different
Michelle Sun · 01:19:17
Yeah. I think one last question that I have is, people have been saying that robotics is five years away for the past almost 30 years. And so what’s on the table now that wasn’t available 10 years ago that you think will truly unlock the next five years being that inflection point? Is that the edge compute side or is it more like the sheer amount of data and maybe it’s a bit of both?
Scott Walter · 01:19:54
Well, I think the most obvious thing is just machine learning and AI has changed everything dramatically. So you can do a lot more. First of all, the fact that we can just use that to control robot armors versus the old way, which was pretty much just that it would do the same thing. It didn’t have any intelligence to adapt to any changes in the environment. So that’s just opened up so many possibilities. Now, the reason why I say that’s important: there’s all these other things that are important. The other is just the interest in the field.
Scott Walter · 01:20:29
Ten years ago, no one was really interested in robotics. Now, that’s all everyone wants to do. And the more minds, especially brilliant minds, you start throwing out a problem like this, the more likely you’re going to solve it. The other has been the result of a lot of improvements in mechanics. And a lot of it comes because people are trying to solve the problem now. They’re trying to solve problems that could have maybe been solved before, but they weren’t interested in. So, making smaller actuators and stuff like that. We know how to make motors for the longest time, but no one really thought of making motors down to that scale that you could put in humanoid.
Scott Walter · 01:20:59
So, you saw Elon complain about that five years ago. That you could not find any actuators on the market for any price to do what you want. Now you can. It’s incredible. You go to Amazon, you can order and you get them a couple of days later. So there’s that. There’s the fact that locomotion is a solved problem, whereas like 10 years ago, it was still very challenging. So all these things are happening: this convergence of technology, new material sciences, new people trying to solve all those things. So what’s happened is that there’s just the excitement.
Scott Walter · 01:21:35
Maybe it’s just this big paradigm shift and the realization that humanoids are possible. Physical intelligence is possible. And this is something I’ve said before people. It’s like I’m a broken record on this. But one of my favorite quotes is from Arthur C. Clarke, where he says the space elevator will be built 50 years after everyone stops laughing. And I’ve paraphrased that to humanoids. Humanoids will be deployed like five years after everyone stops laughing. And I think everyone has kind of stopped laughing now. So that five-year we’re talking about—we’re seeing them already. Come on. They can do some manipulation tasks.
Scott Walter · 01:22:17
They’re just not quite reliable yet. They are going into some deployments. They are doing some of the low hanging fruit. And they’re the worst they’re ever going to be. They’re just going to get better and better and better. And five years from now, that’s a lot of time in humanoid space. Really, when I go back thinking about when we saw the Unitree bot doing the RL program walking, I think that’s ages ago. And I realized that was only 18 months ago. It was like January 2025. And so it’s like: oh, I thought that was, again, in my head, it’s like five.
Scott Walter · 01:22:51
But so what we’re seeing, and again, if we look at the humanoid games and also the mini marathon, the Beijing mini marathon, the contrast in 12 months is just unbelievable. And you’re going to see like that same step change next year in both of those. I’m really, really pretty sure you’re going to see it. So five years, yeah, we’ll be there. We’ll be there. And humanoids will be quite performative at that point.
