Just done with dentist appointment. Idle thought occurred to me that we haven’t really explored the idea of robotic teeth. Chewing up and manipulating/sending bits of the environment with a generalized cutting/grinding/shredding end effector is not a thing in robotics
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There’s of course construction equipment end effectors (excavators, drills, bulldozers) but they’re not really the delicate sensor-actuators our mouths are. No tongue for one. Closest tool is a stand mixer/food processor
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The hard part would be lips/cheeks/tongue… workholding/manipulation/sensing elements in/around a mini machine shop
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If you see animals, their mouth is probably their most sophisticated end effector. Food processing is only one of the functions. Even opposable thumb hands aren’t strictly superior. No chemical sensing. No efficient dough-balling etc.
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Replying to
This is an interesting example of a low-dimensional mouth. Two teeth-like machining ops (axial stripping and transverse cutting) and one tongue-like transport op (axial movement)
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I went down the rabbit hole reading about how harvester heads work and now I'm glad they're not controlled by AI.
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Vocalization mouth
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Replying to @vgr
uh oh youtube.com/watch?v=Bht96v
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I need to make a definition for mouthiness of an end effector. Scale of 0-100. An ordinary 2-3 finger gripper would be like a 5. The tree logger and vocalizer would each be about a 15.
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Replying to @jaschawilcox
What makes the mouth interesting is the efficient convergence of functions around a basic mass intake. Machine shop, chemical pre-processing, mining equipment, weapon, mass spectrograph, threat detector (bitter=poison), vacuum cleaner, blower, speaker/resonator, mass transport...
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The video shared by Lex evokes the opposite reaction in me. It’s too simple and functionally decomposable for AI to add much. To really unleash AI havoc you need a high-dimensional generalized converged mouth. I’d like to design one and AI-ify it. Working name: Smartmouth
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Just remembered I've written a newsletter issue on teeth. I forget I've thought about stuff before and then do some rethinking, but it's usually useful to circle a topic a few times before it locks in as a persistent thread of thought.
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