This article was taken from the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Shadow Robot, a London-based robotics company, has developed a robot hand that has 24 joints driven by 20 motors. With such a wide range of movement, it can pick up even tricky objects, such as pencils.

During summer of this year, the company connected one of the hands to an extremely precise 3D sensor. Developed by a European Commission-funded project, the sensor lets the hand effectively "see" what to grasp by scanning the environment in front of it.


Future applications could include the hand picking up a swab located by the sensor and using it to test a potentially contaminated package. "We've spent a lot of time looking at how we can put robots in places where humans currently go, which we as a society would much rather people didn't have to," explains Rich Walker, Shadow Robot's MD. "So the classic

'difficult, dirty and dangerous'."

Walker says the original plan for the TACO (Three-Dimensional Adaptive Camera with Object Detection and Foveation) was to make a simple 3D-sensor -- "and then the Kinect came out". So the research group, which consists of seven European partners, turned up the power. The laser's 2kW peak output allows the sensor to recognise objects smaller than the Kinect can resolve.

An infrared beam shines on five oscillating micro-mirrors. It bounces off the objects in front of it and is detected by a second sensor that measures the time it took to return, and calculates the depth of the surfaces. Using object-recognition systems, a computer can match a detected object to an item in its database, then instruct the robot arm to handle it appropriately. But with such power, it's not to be toyed with. "If the beam stops scanning, whatever it's pointing at will start to burn," says Walker. "Things catch fire with this laser."