708K RC mobipulator in hand. A related development is some work on rapid prototyping of mobile manipulators and mobile robots. A terse set of instructions is available here . The Palm Pilot Robot Kit is the most interesting example. It is primarily the work of Greg Reshko, collaborating with Illah Nourbakhsh and Garth Zeglin.
Robots typically use static and quasistatic methods to interact with the world.
People, on the other hand, are adept with dynamic methods. Some scientists, notably Bill Calvin , have argued that the evolution of the human brain was driven by the challenges of accurate throwing. It is an interesting challenge to model-based robotics to develop robots that can exploit the dynamics of a task domain. Each of them is planned automatically using information about the object such as its shape and mass, and also with a good model of the dynamic behavior of our arm. Usually we think of robots moving things around by picking them up, but pushing is sometimes better.