
Somewhere on a golf course in rural Hokkaido, a mechanical wolf with glowing red eyes is turning its head from side to side, howling at nothing in particular. It looks absurd. It is also, by most available evidence, working. Monster Wolf is the produ…
Researchers have built a force sensor the size of a grain of rice that lets robots feel pressure and twisting forces using light, and it’s already finding hidden tumors in tissue during early tests.

Two years after a Beijing engineer started building dexterous hands inspired by a Japanese cartoon, his company holds 80% of the global market and is doubling its valuation in months. Robotic hands are not, conventionally, the part of a humanoid robot …