Robot Given the Human Touch

Artificial hands with an almost human-like sense of touch could be on their way.

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Although some modern robots do have ‘fingers’ and are able to pick up delicate objects, they usually rely on cameras and proximity sensors to determine where an object is – the robot doesn’t actually ‘feel’ anything. Now, a team at Cornell University’s Organic Robotics Lab has managed to give a soft prosthetic hand a refined sense of touch. The robot was so sensitive that it could identify which tomato out of a group of three was the ripest, simply by pressing its fin