I am but a babe, exploring the world for the first time. Wearing a computerized glove, I reach forward in pursuit of a little toy basketball. A robotic arm and hand do the same, mimicking my every move. Slowly I grasp the object, lift it, swing my arm over, and let go, dropping the ball--ploink!--into a plastic cup. I am very, very proud of myself.

The beauty of evolution lies in two complementary forces: simplicity and complexity. From a simple rule--survival of the fittest--comes the astonishing array of critters that populate Earth. It doesn't matter if you've got two legs or four legs or no legs at all, there's no one right way to be on this planet. Same goes, as it happens, for robotics. You and I are living on the verge of what you might call the Cambrian Explosion of robotics. Just in the last year, robots have been escaping en masse the factory and the lab to walk and roll and fly among us.

When you think about it, touch is a bizarre sense. Unlike sound or light, tactile properties can be difficult to quantify. You can measure decibels or lumens, but touch is a subjective sense with subjective descriptions, like rough or squishy or cold. Subjective until now, that is. A company called SynTouch, which spun out of the University of Southern California, has created a robotic fingertip that rubs a material and precisely measures the "feel" of it in 15 dimensions, ranging from coarseness to coolness.

In 1937, robot hobbyist "Bill" Griffith P. Taylor of Toronto invented the world's first industrial robot. It was a crude machine, dubbed the Robot Gargantua by its creator. The crane-like device was powered by a single electric motor and controlled via punched paper tape, which threw a series of switches controlling each of the machine's five axes of movement. Still, it could stack wooden blocks in preprogrammed patterns, an accomplishment that Meccano Magazine, an English monthly hobby magazine from the era, hailed as "a Wells-ian vision of'Things to Come' in which human labor will not be necessary in building up the creations of architects and engineers." In the 80 years since, Gargantua's progeny have revolutionized how we work.