ROBOTS SCIENCE ROSARY : LAB PRECIS

IT'S A THING. Handy new robots outdoes both ' The Addams Family ' and real life.

As a mother of three, Aude Billard, a roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, frequently finds herself holding many objects at once. '' I constantly have tons of things under my arms and in my fingers,'' she said.

In these cases she says, '' The fantastic human hand is not that fantastic. When you want to grab something that is behind you, you have to rotate your hand out and do very complex motion. ''

And so, for years, Dr. Bilard has been dreaming about creating a more capable robotic picker-upper.

In the journal Nature Communication, she and her colleagues presented a design for handlike robot that is, in some ways, more dexterous and versatile than our claspers.

It can even detach itself from the rest of the robot to '' crawl and grasp several objects then come back to become a hand again,'' said Xian Gao, one of her co-authors and a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China.

The result is something akin to Thing from '' The Addams Family '' - with all the scamper and skill, but none of the skin or stark. [ Despite the resemblance, neither researcher had heard of Thing until they began showing their new robot to others. '' So, no, it was definitely not inspired by that,'' Dr. Billard said.]

This Master Honours and Precis continues to Part [ 2]. The World Students Society thanks Ari Daniel.