Getting a Grip
In the 1960s, “The Jetsons” cartoon creators Hanna-Barbera imagined the outer-space robot housekeeper of the future as Rosie, a sassy didactyl who was mostly successful at keeping the Jetson family’s Orbit City apartment tidy. Today, truth is arguably just as strange as fiction-considering an inspiration for the engineering behind real twenty-first-century robots able to clean up space debris comes from an unlikely place: the forests of southeast Asia.