A helping hand

Robonaut 2, or R2 for short, builds upon NASA's decade-old Robonaut technology, which was designed specifically for space travel. (The space agency's partner in that go-round was the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, aka DARPA.) While R2 is faster and more technologically advanced in a number of ways, what really stands out are its hands, which NASA says can do work beyond the scope of earlier humanoid robots.