If I asked you to sketch the archetypal industrial robotic arm, you'd probably draw something like a swing-arm lamp: Straight members connected by elbow-like joints, perhaps on a rotating base like a shoulder. The finite, easily-calculable axes of motion of such an arrangement lent themselves well to the early days of robot design and the primitive computer systems that had to manage their motion.
Now, as those computer systems become capable of far more complex calculations, it's only natural that design would follow suit. Thus German engineering company Festo has designed a robotic arm based not on the human arm, but on an elephant trunk--or actually, what resembles three elephant trunks bound together.
The elegant, biomimetic design of Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant is capable of "more degrees of freedom and an unparalleled mass/payload ratio." What's even cooler is how the trunk expands, contracts and turns by alternately inflating or deflating air sacs within each vertebrae-like selection, which you can see in the animation below. A more aesthetically-pleasing performance is not a prerequisite of industrial efficiency, but it sure is a neat by-product.
via tg daily