There are two generalized schools of thought when it comes to robot hand design. You have robot hands that are simple and straightforward and get the job done, like two- or three-finger grippers that can reliably do many (if not most) things well without any fuss. And then you have very complex hands with four fingers and a thumb that are designed to closely mimic human hands, on the theory that human hands were intelligently designed by millions of years of evolution, and we've designed all of our stuff around them anyway, so if you want your robot to be able to do as many things as possible as well as possible you want a hand that's as humanlike as possible. Because of the inherent complexity of a real human hand, biomimetic anthropomorphic hands inevitably involve lots of compromises to get them to work properly while maintaining a human-ish form factor. Zhe Xu and Emanuel Todorov from the University of Washington, in Seattle, have gone crazy and built the most detailed and kinematically accurate biomimetic anthropomorphic robotic hand that we've ever seen, with the ultimate goal of replacing human hands completely. Here's why it was important for them to design a new kind of robotic hand, according to Xu: "The conventional approach to designing anthropomorphic robotic hands often involves mechanizing biological parts with hinges, linkages, and gimbals in order to simplify the seemingly complicated human counterparts. This approach is helpful for understanding and approximating the kinematics of the human hand in general, but inevitably introduces undesirable discrepancies between the human and robotic hands since most of those salient biomechanical features of the human hand are discarded in the mechanizing process. The inherent mismatch between mechanisms of these robotic hands and biomechanics of human hands essentially prevents us from using natural hand motion to directly control them. Thus none of the existing anthropomorphic robotic hands can achieve the human-level dexterity yet."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly automated* Automaton bloggers. We'll be also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Mark your calendars: the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots" is in less than two weeks! Loyal readers of this blog will probably recognize all of the robots and most of the people in the trailer, but it looks like NOVA--which bills itself as "the most-watched primetime science series on television"--scored some great expert commentary along with footage of DRC robots that we've never seen before.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your biped Automaton bloggers. We're also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. This a clever little promotional commercial for IBM's Watson, with Carrie Fisher and some other people you might recognize: The best thing about this is that almost all of those robots were physically constructed, not CGI. And each of them has its own little vignette, which you can see on IBM's YouTube channel.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your mysophobic Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. XDog is a small electric quadruped designed and built by Xing Wang, a graduate student at Shanghai University, with support from his adviser Jia Wenchuan. The robot has 12 motors (each leg has 3 DoF), and uses force sensors on each foot, IMU, and joint-angle sensors for control.

Editors Note: This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here. Once upon a time there was a very odd British television show called The Prisoner, which featured a secret agent repeatedly attempting to escape from a mysterious village. One of the biggest threats the agent faced was a giant balloon called Rover, which would pursue and subdue rule-breaking villagers. Now Rover has been brought to reality, albeit in a much more adorable version, thanks to the engineers at Aerotain and their Skye inflatable drone.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your starving Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Domino's in New Zealand (or Australia, we're not sure) has developed this pizza-delivery robot and I can't tell if they're serious or not: The New Zealand government at least, is taking them seriously, according to Stuff.co.nz: Transport Minister Simon Bridges said Domino's had made contact "a few weeks ago" to inform the Government about DRU and see if New Zealand was interested in hosting trials.

Editors Note: This week IEEE Spectrum is covering CeBIT, the enormous information and communications technology show that takes place annually in Hanover, Germany. For up-to-the-second updates, you can follow our CeBIT Ninja, Stephen Cass, on Twitter (@stephencass), or catch daily highlights throughout the week here. The World Wide Web is the most famous technology to emerge from the needs of the international particle physics research center CERN, but it's not the only one. In the latest example, a lightweight, inexpensive (and maker-friendly) range sensor has come about because scientists want to use drones to survey tunnels and vaults without smashing into expensive and difficult to replace equipment. CERN's massive subterranean facility lies underneath farm fields between Geneva and the Jura mountains.

Recently I looked a project being undertaken by a British team from Lancaster and Manchester universities respectively. The team were looking at how robotics could be better deployed to help in the aftermath of a nuclear accident. It's part of a growing trend that is seeing robots deployed in extremely hazardous environments, such as this German project that is using robots in bomb detection and disposal situations. A common feature of most of these projects is that human beings remain in control of the robots, which can create issues regarding the agility of the robots and their responsiveness to circumstances on the ground. A British team are attempting to rectify this with a new system that uses telepresence to allow for a more adaptive means of controlling the robot.

Software that turns eye movement into musical notes lets you compose music or play a tune on a virtual instrument with just your eyes. Called Eye Conductor, it was developed by Andreas Refsgaard at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Denmark and his colleagues to provide a musical outlet for people with physical disabilities. Caring for a boy with muscular dystrophy, Refsgaard found that it was hard to help him express himself creatively. "I wanted to create a solution that still requires practice, like a traditional instrument," he says. The system uses an off-the-shelf eye tracker with a webcam to follow a person's gaze.

The animals of neuroscience research are an eclectic bunch, and for good reason. Different model organisms--like zebra fish larvae, C. elegans worms, fruit flies, and mice--give researchers the opportunity to answer specific questions. The first two, for example, have transparent bodies, which let scientists easily peer into their brains; the last two have eminently tweakable genomes, which allow scientists to isolate the effects of specific genes. For cognition studies, researchers have relied largely on primates and, more recently, rats, which I use in my own work. But the time is ripe for this exclusive club of research animals to accept a new, avian member: the corvid family.