'Luke Arm'

Dean Kamen is known best for his inventions of the Segway and iBOT, an all-terrain electric wheelchair. But I think that one of his more impressive creations is his "Luke Arm", the first fully functional, mind controlled robotic arm...

"You're nuts," is what Kamen first told the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) when they asked him to develop a fully brain-controlled arm prosthesis in just two years. Just to make things a little more difficult, the 'raisin test' was one of DARPA's original demands when they first gave Kamen the project. "With the arm you're going to give us...a guy is going to pick up a raisin or grape," DARPA officials told Kamen, "If it's the grape, he won't break it. If it's the raisin, he won't drop it." In just fifteen months Kamen had finished the project, and to DARPA's satisfaction, he didn't drop the grape...