But it is a night light, which goes great with your ensemble if you're a southern belle who's also a robot. [Lost Values via Fashioning Tech via MAKE]

The RAPHaEL (Robotic Air Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments) is the brilliant tool from the minds of Virginia Tech. Like you see in the name, air drives the hand's movement without costly or bulky motors/actuators. The system requires just 60 psi, which when guided by microcontroller commands, allows the hand to open and close with precision down to the individual finger.

As you see in the clip, this design can just as easily grasp a can as a light bulb. Plus, it makes a cool pssht sound whenever you grab something. [VirginiaTech via Engadget]

Bundled with The House of the Dead Overkill or purchasable from Amazon UK for $17, the Overkill Hand Cannon is beautiful in that it's the anti-Wii, the anti-family-hanging-out-on-Friday-night before their Disney Channel marathon.

For a Wii peripheral, it is indeed "overkill," clearly manufactured with the intent to be spraypainted black before holding up a Gamestop, its namesake intact. [Amazon UK via Kotaku]

The Clicking Kitchen Grip is perfect for those times you want to mentally point, click and drag your way to culinary bliss—when you like to take the term "food porn" just a tad more literally. But since the Clicking Kitchen Grip isn't on sale just yet, you'll have to settle for the oldest cooking trick in the book instead:

Add more butter. [Bazar Design via CraziestGadgets]

The webcam is trained to separate the foreground (hands) from the background (in this case, Andy's keyboard), which makes it much easier to identify different shapes made by his fingers. He can then move the cursor, click, and use two hands to perform more complex motions like stretching and pulling. He doesn't get into too much detail, partly because he has to constantly remind whoever's filming that no, this isn't magic, and no, there isn't a little person under his desk secretly making the cursor move on the screen.

The demo is really impressive for how simple Andy makes it all seem, and it'd be great to see what else he can do from this base. [MAKE]

The important part of all this isn't really the robotic arms but more the controller device. A cylindrical interface is gripped by each hand and measures each contact point on your palms and fingers, which allows for the slightness variation in applied pressure to control the attached robo-arms. The cylindrical interface is also mounted upon a movable controller which will register directional movements. So what this means is all your finger, hand and arm movements are transferred over to the robo-arms without even getting out of your seat.

But yeah, there's still no super-powerful robot arms... sorry [MeisterGRIP at SIGGRAPH]

Those motors are arranged in opposing pairs, along with non-linear spring systems so that they mimic the opposing muscle structure that gives human hands their dexterity. The team achieved this by making hundreds of MRI scans of real hands in different positions. And apparently this has paid off, since it means the Sensopac hand can snap its fingers, pick up an egg or carry a cup of liquid much like we do.

The really clever bit, though, is in the artificial intelligence that controls the limb. In humans the cerebellum controls sensation and movement, so the team have created a neural-net system that mimics it to control the arm in a more "natural" manner. It's apparently the "first neural-network-based controller that can control the dynamics of a robotic system in its full operational range,” and means that the arm (when perfected) would be able to pick up a cup, sense what the contents feels like and handle it appropriately.

The arm is now in advanced testing, but it'll be a while before robots have a limb that behaves exactly like ours do: that's "still light-years away" according to the project coordinator. Doesn't stop me wondering how long it'll be until there's an entire neural-net robot droid built with this biomimetic tech though. And then there's personality downloads to think about... [ICTResults via Physorg]

Right and left mouse buttons are placed on the side in a thumb-accessible position, and the design is unobtrusive enough to allow for easy typing when it's on. We'd love to get a hand-on with the mouse if it ever comes out. It looks great and the ability to surf the internet without keeping our hand close to the computer is very conducive to our leisure time activities. [patent via istartedsomething]

Product Page [Rakuten via Plastic Bamboo]