Meet the Matrix, er, Elephant Trunk-Inspired Arm of Your Future Robot Overlord

Meet Festo, a prototype robotic arm that takes its design inspiration from the way an elephant's trunk moves everywhich way thanks to its series of highly-flexible muscle segments. Clever? Yes. On the way to real robots? Probably. Scary?...

Festo's design is actually a clever half-way house between a fully-articulated robot arm that mimics the musculo-skeletal structure of, say, a human arm (like Dean Kamen's Luke arm,) and a basic rotating-joint robot arm such as you might find currently in...