With its palm open, the robot is completely motionless. A
split second later, it suddenly unwinds and catches all sorts of flying objects
thrown in its direction -a tennis racket, a ball, a bottle-. This arm measures
about 1.5 meters long and keeps an upright position. It has three joints and a
sophisticated hand with four fingers. It was programmed at the Learning
Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at EPFL (LASA) and designed to test robotic
solutions for capturing moving objects. It is unique, as it has the ability to
catch projectiles of various irregular shapes in less than five hundredths of a
second.