# How could you put brains in robot fingers? # How could you put brains in robot fingers For fully autonomous robots you don’t need to do this because the latency from an actuator to a central processor is very low. However telerobotics latencies resemble the latency between the tip of a finger and the brain. Humans deal with the latency in the nervous system by having reaction loops that bypass the brain — that is, your finger will react to something hot before your brain registers something is hot. Is it possible to build these central-processing-out-of-the-loop controllers into robotic actuators? My understanding is that [[Boston Dynamics]] uses a hierarchical control system that might roughly resemble what I’m describing here? The questions then become: Could better ‘edge-control’ solve problems in telerobotics? What is the state of ‘edge-control’ for robotics. This would be the robotics analogy of [reflex arcs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex_arc) From [[Matt Kelly]] ` It is fascinating how well humans can perform complicated control despite the ~250ms round trip latency from finger to brain to finger. My understanding is similar to yours: lots of the “high-rate” control actually happens lower in the brainstem or spinal cord which has a lower latency, and the brain has a ton of experience modelling exactly how that latency works. My guess, for example, is that the brain does a really good job of predicting what will happen on the ~300ms timescale and can essentially to open loop control on that horizon, continually updating the plan at a much higher rate. But really, who knows how brains actually work. I’m biased by a decade of modern control theory work. It would be a neat project to see how well you could make a robot perform with a fixed known lag on the order of 200ms. Let’s discuss more on the phone sometime.` ### Related * [[There are five heavily coupled areas of improvement for telerobotics technically]] * [[What are the state of the art haptic devices?]] * [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/How+could+you+put+brains+in+robot+fingers) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/How+could+you+put+brains+in+robot+fingers)