OpenAI is a company that was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015 as a non profit research company that aims to discover and enact the path to safe artificial general intelligence (AGI).





One of the most remarkable features that evolution has bestowed upon us other than our brain is our hands. It is a belief among many scientists that our opposable thumbs are in fact, what allowed us to become a superior species ahead of other highly intelligent creatures like Dolphins and Elephants.





In a blog post published by OpenAI on Monday, they claim to have harnessed the power of AI and deep learning to bestow the dexterity of the human hand to robots. Their system named Dactyl is trained entirely in simulation and is able to apply this training in the real world.





Here are the examples of the complex movements the robotic hand is capable of performing:





The degree of freedom of a robot, to explain in a simplified way, is the number of ways it can move. In most Industrial applications a robotic arm with 7 degrees of freedom is considered quite advanced. The Dactyl trained arm of OpenAI has 24 degrees of freedom. Furthermore, it has the capability to work with partial information from its sensors and manipulate objects of different geometry.





Here is a schematic of how OpenAI trains the Robot:

As can be understood by the above illustration, the robot is trained entirely in simulation. This allows it to be taught much faster. Also, the setup uses normal RGB cameras to see the object by running orientation estimation algorithms in neural networks. This means that it does not need special objects that are designed for camera tracking, to function.

This can have amazing applications in handling objects harmful to humans. The success of the technology could be extrapolated to other movements possible by humans to one day build complete humanoid robots like the ones we saw in the Movie "I,Robot".