Made with wood, springs and rubber bands, Rich Walker remembers fondly the first robotic hand built by Shadow Robot in the late 1990s. "A lot of it was done with just stuff that we had," says Walker, now a company director. I'm in Shadow Robot's north London headquarters, looking at their latest robotic hands. Cylindrical "forearms" house small electric motors, known as actuators, which pull on metal tendons that move the fingers with precision. To use the robotic hands, sensors are strapped to