As part of the on-going rise of consumer-level robotics, recent research in artificial intelligence and bio-inspired devices has reached a new plateau of possibilities. Modern robots are now able to fill an increasingly broad scope of roles in both home and work environments.
* Easily one of the most important (and difficult) abilities for such machines is being able to recognise and interact with various physical objects. For simple or repetitive tasks, such as assembly line production, this knowledge was relatively straightforward, requiring simple programming and mechanical systems. However, the growing complexity of environments that commercial robots now have to encounter has driven research into more intricate and capable mechanisms.
As has often been the case, engineers turned to the human body itself to model both the
