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"If you have a gut response to a story, you are not responding to something new ..you are really responding to a story you were told when you were six or seven…"
- Samuel R. Delany

Robotic Hand  
  A dexterous manipulator for robots.  

When designing Flexible Frank, the all-purpose robot, great attention was paid to the manipulators provided to the robot.

But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain... a good enough brain.

Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl's hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes...

The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses - though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.

Technovelgy from The Door Into Summer, by Robert Heinlein.
Published by Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1956
Additional resources -

Compare to the mechanical hand from Buck Rogers, 2430 AD (1929) by Philip Nowlan (w/D. Calkins), microhands from Microhands (Микроруки) (1931) by Boris Zhitkov, iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1931) by Neil R. Jones, robot hands from The Iron World (1937) by Otis Adelbert Kline, waldoes from Waldo (1942) by Robert Heinlein, robot surgeon-hand from War Veteran (1955) by Philip K. Dick, interchangeable hands from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K. Dick, surgical hand from Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) by Philip K. Dick and office hand from The Human Blend (2010) by Alan Dean Foster.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Door Into Summer
  More Ideas and Technology by Robert Heinlein
  Tech news articles related to The Door Into Summer
  Tech news articles related to works by Robert Heinlein

Robotic Hand-related news articles:
  - Electrolocation Robotic Hand Has PreTouch
  - Obrero Robot Has The Soft Touch
  - DLR Robotic Hand-Arm Is Super-Strong, Super-Tough
  - Most Advanced Robotic Hand?

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Robot Bees 3D Printed By Festo
DIY Robot Scorpion Crushes It
How To Settle An Argument Between Two Robots

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