January w3 2026

This week has been a incredibly important week for us. Last week we devised a test that we think would be tricky in our current glove, and far beyond what is possible for a gas bladder glove. The test involves three sets of transferring a progressively smaller nut between two bolts. Using the nut and bolts we could find in the shop, we pairs we ended up with were 10-32, 6-32 and m1.8x0,35. The bolts have diameters of 4.8mm, 2.8mm and 1.8mm respectively. Without wearing a glove, I could complete the task in 40s, and wearing a glove at 0.35 psia (about 98% of pure vacuum, or 23 mBar) I could complete in 151s. We’ve gone to deeper vacuum than that using this test setup of course (down to about 3 mBar), but given that the chamber seals using a gasket at my wrist, and I was moving my wrist quite a bit, holding at a lower vacuum is not unexpected. I spent a cumulative several hours in the vacuum chamber, and we learned a lot about it’s capabilities and limitations. Looking forward to building the next version with all these learnings in mind. The result of all this time at vacuum filming these dexterity tests will be a series of great videos that we are editing together to share more widely next week. I’m very excited to reach out to so many of the researchers who I deeply respect and share our breakthrough with them.