robotic hands

Families won't see any more household squabbles over dishwashing duty in the future, if Panasonic's kitchen robot has any say. The mechanical server uses a four-fingered hand to serve food from pans and fill waiting dishes, as well as empty glasses in the sink before depositing them safely in the dishwasher.

Yoky Matsuoka, the director of the Neurobotics Laboratory at the University of Washington, and one of the honorees in our most recent class of the Brilliant Ten, took some time to chat with Talking Robots about her work in particular, and the future of robotics in general. One of Matsuoka's many projects involves building an anatomically-correct mechanical hand—see the video above of the finger in action—and she also has big ideas about brain-machine interfaces, tele-manipulation and robots in the home.