The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a major new initiative to create robotic autonomous manipulators that mimic the human hands, an agency program manager said. For the past several decades, the research agency and the robotics community have concentrated their efforts on programming ground robots to get from point A to point B, said Robert Mandelbaum, a DARPA program manager who focuses on robotics and autonomous systems. That challenge has for the most part been tackled, he said. The autonomous robotics manipulation program will take on a new goal, creating an inexpensive hand-like device that is as adaptable as...