Human hands let us solve a wide variety of tasks. For the past 60 years of robotics, hard tasks which humans accomplish with their fixed pair of hands have required designing a custom robot for each task. As an alternative, people have spent many decades trying to use general-purpose robotic hardware, but with limited success due to their high degrees of freedom. In particular, the hardware we use here is not new—the robot hand we use has been around for the last 15 years—but the software approach is.
Since May 2017, we’ve been trying to train a human-like robotic hand to solve the Rubik’s Cube. We set this goal because we believe that successful training such a robotic hand to do complex manipulation tasks lays the foundation for general-purpose robots. We solved the Rubik’s Cube in simulation in July 2017. But as of July 2018, we could only manipulate a block on the robot. Now, we’ve reached our initial goal.
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