Make: Volume 93

what you want at the end of your robot arm.

But the biggest way that robot hands differ

from human hands is sensing. Our hands are

incredibly sensitive. You can easily feel the height

change of a single sheet of paper sitting on a

table. When we want to fool a human’s eyes we

use video at 30–60 frames per second, but when

we want to fool human hands (for giving haptic

feedback) we generally want to run at 1,000

“frames” per second because the bandwidth of

your hands is so much higher than your eyes.

Think about how hard it is to do a delicate task

with your whole hand numbed.

My money is on a less

human-looking hand (with

fewer and bigger fingers) ...