| > Washing and destemming a tomato is more of a problem to solve now that will need another 10+ years of price reductions in robot+end effector costs and increased efficiency before it beats bulk washing and hand-destemming (or crude machine work). Maybe it'll be a grad-student's project for a theoretical future home-bot Heh, fair. I wasn't thinking of this as a practical usage, it was just the first thing to come to mind when imagining a task requiring a lot of pressure sensitivity and a range of forces. Then again, now that I've said it, I believe the current approach to this is to breed really hard, tasteless tomatoes and then agitate them in a vat. Perhaps we can eventually get tastier produce if robots can handle more fragile things! Hm... or you could invert things and make a glove, then use it as a controller. (VR, or just a richer set of control dimensions for eg photo editing or something.) I guess that needs to generalize across hand shapes and sizes, not just swapping out the glove, but I'd be up for a calibration/training phase. > * Harder to suggest items for food as soft grippers (inflatable fingers) will grip at the precise pressure that they're inflated, reducing the need for sensitive feedback. The application for this touch sensor would be food that needs a combination of different pressures to properly secure something, can't think of a great example How do you know the right pressure without feedback? A lot of foods vary in firmness over time and ripeness. Lemons, for example. I guess most don't, as long as you're sticking to a single type of food. |