This isNigel Ackland, and he's pouring himself a beer. With his robot hand.

Nigel's using one of the new bebionic3 robot hands, which were just released a month or two ago. The specs on this thing aren't quite going to bring you over to the dark side, but they're quite impressive:

You can make a robotic arm and hand system as fancy as you want, but it has to be comfortable, lightweight, and easy to control or nobody is going to use it. The bebionic3 weighs just 550 grams (for the record, your hand and forearm weighs about 2.3% of your body weight), and as you can see in the vid, with a little bit of practice it's controllable with muscle movements that are small and precise enough that the arm appears to just do what the user wants it to.

What we're really excited about is the day (and it's coming!) when things like this don't even make the news because it's going on all the time. And at some point, users of roboticprostheticswill find themselves being able to take advantage of morecapabilitiesthan you'd find in a biological arm, like increased strength, increased durability, a wrist that can rotate infinitely, or perhaps the addition of an extra finger or two that includes someinterchangeabletooling. The short term focus, of course, should be on making it easier for people with disabilities to do what they want to do, but in the future of cybernetics there's the potential for a wide variety of improvements to individual humans, in the style of Deus Ex, Star Trek, Star Wars, iRobot, and a thousand other imagined sci-fi worlds become real.

[ bebionic ] via [ DV!CE ]

Read the rest here:

Bebionic3 Cyborg Hand is Perfect for Pouring a Beer, Doing Almost Anything Else