Wow, so many hard problems in a single sequence here. And each one is a reason machines have not yet replaced human hands on assembly lines.

@DynaRobotics shows their dual-arm robot cracking a fortune cookie and extracting a tiny paper slip

Deformable objects are one of the toughest problems for robotics to handle.

The hardest part may actually start after the cookie cracks.

One rigid object suddenly becomes several fragments plus a thin, partly occluded piece of paper, so the robot has to continue the task after its entire manipulation scene has changed.

The policy has to update its internal stress model on the fly as the cookie opens, something that exposes the limits of most current foundation models on irreversible state transitions.