Episode 33: Dexterous Robotics — Kushal Kedia

Robot hands have become remarkably good. Iman Mossavat talks with Dr. Kushal Kedia, a postdoc at MIT, who thinks we are wasting most of what they can do.

Kushal’s diagnosis is that hardware has jumped ahead of software. A robot taught by demonstration can only be as good as the person puppeteering it, and a human is a master of their own body, not of a five-fingered hand with 22 joints. He wants “the max juice” out of the hardware, meaning letting the robot find things nobody showed it.

Play2Perfect, a paper Kushal co-authored with colleagues, starts with play. Before the hand is trained to insert a peg or screw something in, it plays with random objects, a bit like a baby, until it controls its fingers. The precise assembly then takes two to five hours to learn, with no hand-engineered reward.

Now the uncomfortable part. A robot that beats its teacher will sometimes make a Move 37, a move that looks like a blunder until you understand it. Kushal wants that, but legible to the people standing next to the robot.