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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Robotic Hand | ||
| A dexterous manipulator for robots. |
When designing Flexible Frank, the all-purpose robot, great attention was paid to the manipulators provided to the robot.
| But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain... a good enough brain.
Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl's hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes... The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses - though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled. |
| Technovelgy from The Door Into Summer,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1956 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1931) by Neil R. Jones, robot hands from The Iron World (1937) by Otis Adelbert Kline, waldoes from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, robot surgeon-hand from War Veteran (1955) by Philip K. Dick, interchangeable hands from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick, surgical hand from Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) by Philip K. Dick and office hand from The Human Blend (2010) by Alan Dean Foster.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Door Into Summer
More Ideas
and Technology by Robert Heinlein
Tech news articles related to The Door Into Summer
Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein
Robotic Hand-related
news articles:
- Electrolocation Robotic Hand Has PreTouch
- Obrero Robot Has The Soft Touch
- DLR Robotic Hand-Arm Is Super-Strong, Super-Tough
- Most Advanced Robotic Hand?
| Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto |
| HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano |
| Woven Fiber Electronic Skin For Robots |
| Robots For Hire En Masse |
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'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
