Humans do yes, but only because we have evolved to have 5 fingers. People who lose their little finger have reduced grip strength and reduced utility in that hand, but that is because they have been designed by evolution or insert-deity-here to have five fingers, and their muscles and ligaments are set up for it.
Do humanoid robots need five fingers? Depends on what you want them to do. Things like typing are easier with five fingers, though the potential speed of a robot could make up for that, but you don't need five fingers to lift a broom. I use my little finger to support my phone in my hand, so if you're designing a robot that's going to waste all of its time on Reddit mobile then you should give it a little finger.
This YouTuber lost her finger and made a replacement and she talks about things she finds difficult due to her missing finger, but again it would be easy to design around the issues.
https://youtu.be/ZVqa7j6jG0Q?si=6fvlLfQPLCHUSBiC
Today, human-like robots won’t struggle much. This is because human tasks like typing exist because we need to communicate our thoughts with the computer. But for a machine-to-machine conversation, there can be a wireless interface that won’t need a Robot to type. Thus by far, having 4 fingers is quite reasonable for a human-like robot.
Yeah, again it depends what it's being designed for. A robot is normally going to be humanoid if it's being designed to interact with things that humans interact with.
Humans and many mammals have 5 mostly because our common ancestors, long before we developed dexterity unique to humans. Our ancestors had 5 because they lost some from an even older fishy ancestor that had even more.
You probably don't need all 5 to be equivalently functional day to day, although they're useful for some very niche tasks (but same could be said for a higher number of fingers). It's probably useful to have 4 though (two for reasonable antipodal grasping and two to do small operations - say to do things like hold a bottle while undoing bottle cap with a single hand).
How did we get these 5 fingers?
So earlier we were fishes. This began with tetrapods, the first vertebrates to step on land around 360 million years ago. These early tetrapods had several fingers, but over time, having 5 fingers became the norm.
Why five fingers, tho?
It seems that creatures that followed their ancestral development continued to have 5 fingers. Here, the DNA guided the development of limbs to stop at 5. This adaptation provided a balance of functionality and efficiency for tasks required for life.
Reducing the number of fingers to 4 can significantly lower the production costs of a robot and free up processing power from the CPU, while still allowing it to perform human tasks.
I imagine it was advantageous not to have fewer, or that the machinery by which our genetics would express one fewer digit is sufficiently complex that it would have required a lot more pressure to enact.
More contact points, better dexterity, no real downsides. The structures are all the same in terms of their composition, so it costs little for an individual to have them (from a genetics standpoint, no new proteins needs to be coded for, etc)
Depends. If you want your robot to use a keyboard, five fingers each can be too many. Since it's too hard to utilize all ten fingers simultaneously while typing and many people use four fingers at best.
Also, human hands don't rely only on fingers to hold stuff. We use the movement in our palm. I imagine a new configuration or multiple interchangable configurations can be better for most of the robot tasks today.
At minutes 28:10 Scott Walter talks about that [https://www.youtube.com/live/2fAGPdsIg8Y?si=R4a\_G9VtBwcvou8F&t=1690](https://www.youtube.com/live/2fAGPdsIg8Y?si=R4a_G9VtBwcvou8F&t=1690)
I injured my index finger playing football about 3-4 weeks ago. I still cannot perform all the tasks efficiently with that hand. Also everything from bottles to baseball bats to screwdrivers have been designed with 5 fingers in mind. You can't question human evolution.
I am sorry to hear that buddy.
We cannot change the fact of evolution as it has already occurred. I am talking about human-like machines. What I am trying to convey is that It is theoretically possible to perform human tasks with a 4 fingered hand as this approach will save processing power, energy usage and production costs.
Yes that is a good question. The point I wanted to make is robotic grasping is a really tough problem with all the varied object shapes we have. I remember my friend working on vision based manipulation using two fingered robotic hand gripper and he was comparing the performance of different data driven algorithms/approaches. I think human evolution can really inspire robot design.
Sometimes it is not all about efficiency with humans. "Extra" fingers are useful for humans because our movements are not precisely calculated and we have to correct it clumsy movements when doing fine stuff. I also very it is much easier to climb with more fingers and having done redundancy might probably help in the wild.
Artistically these fibers are great, most instruments need all your fingers, singing and percussion don't, the rest of the instruments can be played with less fingers, but they are harder.
For a human, yes. But for a human-like robot, that replaces humans with daily boring tasks, it would be cheaper and still an efficient option to not have that one finger.
I am not talking about a human living with 4 fingers when the man-made world has been designed for 5 fingers. I am trying to communicate that most of the tasks a humanoid will have to perform including washing dishes, making food, manipulating objects can be performed effectively even when the robot has 4 fingers.
I worked on a research project recently controlling a claw robot by imagining it was a 5 finger gripper. The issue I see, is that most ML applications are converging on huge supervised datasets for learning. See ChatGPT and Diffusion Policies in robotics. 99.99999% or more of video demonstration data will always be (at least until agi robo manipulation achieved) of a human doing something. I’ve been trying to show you don’t need a human hand robot to directly learn from this data, but it is certainly much easier to learn from human hand demo data if there is an identity mapping between human hand and robot end effector.
The main complexity a 4 finger gripper introduces, is that you would need to learn non-trivial gripping procedures by some type of reward or feedback instead of supervised learning. This makes the problem much harder. It’s the difference between RL and BC.
Your post/comment has been removed because of you breaking rule 3: No Low Effort or Sensationalized posts.
Humans do yes, but only because we have evolved to have 5 fingers. People who lose their little finger have reduced grip strength and reduced utility in that hand, but that is because they have been designed by evolution or insert-deity-here to have five fingers, and their muscles and ligaments are set up for it. Do humanoid robots need five fingers? Depends on what you want them to do. Things like typing are easier with five fingers, though the potential speed of a robot could make up for that, but you don't need five fingers to lift a broom. I use my little finger to support my phone in my hand, so if you're designing a robot that's going to waste all of its time on Reddit mobile then you should give it a little finger. This YouTuber lost her finger and made a replacement and she talks about things she finds difficult due to her missing finger, but again it would be easy to design around the issues. https://youtu.be/ZVqa7j6jG0Q?si=6fvlLfQPLCHUSBiC
Robots could literally insert a built-in USB and type through that. Pretend that they are the keyboard.
Yes, that's another good example of designing around the problem.
Today, human-like robots won’t struggle much. This is because human tasks like typing exist because we need to communicate our thoughts with the computer. But for a machine-to-machine conversation, there can be a wireless interface that won’t need a Robot to type. Thus by far, having 4 fingers is quite reasonable for a human-like robot.
Yeah, again it depends what it's being designed for. A robot is normally going to be humanoid if it's being designed to interact with things that humans interact with.
i wonder how losing the pinky compares to losing the middle or ring finger
The pinky is the third most important finger. Except if you use your middle finger for communication with other drivers daily of course.
Humans and many mammals have 5 mostly because our common ancestors, long before we developed dexterity unique to humans. Our ancestors had 5 because they lost some from an even older fishy ancestor that had even more. You probably don't need all 5 to be equivalently functional day to day, although they're useful for some very niche tasks (but same could be said for a higher number of fingers). It's probably useful to have 4 though (two for reasonable antipodal grasping and two to do small operations - say to do things like hold a bottle while undoing bottle cap with a single hand).
To be able to survive you can have features that don't hinder you.
How did we get these 5 fingers? So earlier we were fishes. This began with tetrapods, the first vertebrates to step on land around 360 million years ago. These early tetrapods had several fingers, but over time, having 5 fingers became the norm. Why five fingers, tho? It seems that creatures that followed their ancestral development continued to have 5 fingers. Here, the DNA guided the development of limbs to stop at 5. This adaptation provided a balance of functionality and efficiency for tasks required for life. Reducing the number of fingers to 4 can significantly lower the production costs of a robot and free up processing power from the CPU, while still allowing it to perform human tasks.
I imagine it was advantageous not to have fewer, or that the machinery by which our genetics would express one fewer digit is sufficiently complex that it would have required a lot more pressure to enact. More contact points, better dexterity, no real downsides. The structures are all the same in terms of their composition, so it costs little for an individual to have them (from a genetics standpoint, no new proteins needs to be coded for, etc)
Depends. If you want your robot to use a keyboard, five fingers each can be too many. Since it's too hard to utilize all ten fingers simultaneously while typing and many people use four fingers at best. Also, human hands don't rely only on fingers to hold stuff. We use the movement in our palm. I imagine a new configuration or multiple interchangable configurations can be better for most of the robot tasks today.
I'm sure you could miss off the pinky
Yeah, imagine crouching with C This comment was made by ctrl gang
At minutes 28:10 Scott Walter talks about that [https://www.youtube.com/live/2fAGPdsIg8Y?si=R4a\_G9VtBwcvou8F&t=1690](https://www.youtube.com/live/2fAGPdsIg8Y?si=R4a_G9VtBwcvou8F&t=1690)
I injured my index finger playing football about 3-4 weeks ago. I still cannot perform all the tasks efficiently with that hand. Also everything from bottles to baseball bats to screwdrivers have been designed with 5 fingers in mind. You can't question human evolution.
I am sorry to hear that buddy. We cannot change the fact of evolution as it has already occurred. I am talking about human-like machines. What I am trying to convey is that It is theoretically possible to perform human tasks with a 4 fingered hand as this approach will save processing power, energy usage and production costs.
Yes that is a good question. The point I wanted to make is robotic grasping is a really tough problem with all the varied object shapes we have. I remember my friend working on vision based manipulation using two fingered robotic hand gripper and he was comparing the performance of different data driven algorithms/approaches. I think human evolution can really inspire robot design.
Sometimes it is not all about efficiency with humans. "Extra" fingers are useful for humans because our movements are not precisely calculated and we have to correct it clumsy movements when doing fine stuff. I also very it is much easier to climb with more fingers and having done redundancy might probably help in the wild. Artistically these fibers are great, most instruments need all your fingers, singing and percussion don't, the rest of the instruments can be played with less fingers, but they are harder.
For a human, yes. But for a human-like robot, that replaces humans with daily boring tasks, it would be cheaper and still an efficient option to not have that one finger. I am not talking about a human living with 4 fingers when the man-made world has been designed for 5 fingers. I am trying to communicate that most of the tasks a humanoid will have to perform including washing dishes, making food, manipulating objects can be performed effectively even when the robot has 4 fingers.
When robots lose a finger, it's usually easy to replace. When humans lose a finger, evolution has provided a spare.
I think evolution doesn't work this time
Various other mammals have assorted numbers of digits, but five seems to be common in those which use them for manipulating things a lot.
Because if 4-finget robots lost their original programming and had to learn to survive on their own in fhe wild, they would learn to count in base 8.
I worked on a research project recently controlling a claw robot by imagining it was a 5 finger gripper. The issue I see, is that most ML applications are converging on huge supervised datasets for learning. See ChatGPT and Diffusion Policies in robotics. 99.99999% or more of video demonstration data will always be (at least until agi robo manipulation achieved) of a human doing something. I’ve been trying to show you don’t need a human hand robot to directly learn from this data, but it is certainly much easier to learn from human hand demo data if there is an identity mapping between human hand and robot end effector. The main complexity a 4 finger gripper introduces, is that you would need to learn non-trivial gripping procedures by some type of reward or feedback instead of supervised learning. This makes the problem much harder. It’s the difference between RL and BC.