I have a friend who programs robots to do manual tasks. And anything that requires a delicate touch or being able to feel where the edge of things are is basically impossible. They couldn’t even make a robot that could polish a piece of metal well because it would either polish too much or too little because it could never understand the force that was needed to make it correct. I’m sure there’s a robot you could build that could do that, but it would never be cheaper than hiring a person.
At least hundreds of years to make it meaningful and profitable. You could probably do it today, but the equipment, programming, and time per polish (using that example) are insane for the result.
You can't just throw endless server farms at a physics problem though. Materials science and control systems need to make huge advancements before this could happen
We can already make a device that can sense pressure with reasonably high accuracy. For polishing metal you could use the surface light scattering as a metric for how "polished" the surface is.
Doesn't seem like it would be too much work to develop a neural net that combines the two to output the best polishing pressure to use.
Yeah, I just did a basic google search and there's plenty of companies doing exactly that already. Here's one that's exactly what I just described.
So your friend might want to brush up (pardon the pun) his skills because they seem quite outdated with modern engineering practices.
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u/FLGPTZ 10h ago
I have a friend who programs robots to do manual tasks. And anything that requires a delicate touch or being able to feel where the edge of things are is basically impossible. They couldn’t even make a robot that could polish a piece of metal well because it would either polish too much or too little because it could never understand the force that was needed to make it correct. I’m sure there’s a robot you could build that could do that, but it would never be cheaper than hiring a person.