We don’t think much about our hands until they are hurt, and all of a sudden numerous little tasks we took for granted suddenly become impossible or painful.

Hands are incredibly flexible. Think what is happening to enable them to pick up from a table in succession a coin, a flat piece of paper, a heavy jug of milk, a marble, a piece of cloth, some sand from a pile of sand. And so on.

So, question. How can robot engineers replicate that? Fiendlishly difficult.

The answer lies in looking at the problem differently.

What, after all, is a hand? A tool for shaping itself to adjust to different objects and surfaces and then applying grip. So to do those things do you need fingers?

No. A balloon filled with ground coffee and a vacuum effect will do very nicely.