Pizza chefs have inspired researchers to create more dexterous robot designs (Image: Uppercut RF/Getty Images)
ROBOTS have many virtues, but when it comes to manipulating objects they can sometimes be all fingers and thumbs. Now a team of Japanese engineers has turned to an unlikely source of inspiration to improve robots’ dexterity: a pizza parlour.
“An Italian chef dextrously manipulates a pizza in an oven using a tool called a pizza peel,” says Makoto Kaneko, the team’s leader at Osaka University. A pizza peel consists of little more than a flat blade attached to the end of a long pole, but it gives the chef a…
