You’re preparing breakfast in our perfectly sanitary hall pantry. You reach down for an egg, your fingers seamlessly adapting to its curvature, providing a gentle, but firm grip as you remove it from the carton. You tap the egg gently against the side of the pan, splitting its shell with a crisp crack as you drop the egg onto the scalding pan’s surface.

Tossing the shells into a nearby bin, you wrap your fingers around the handle of the pan, feeling its warmth as it works its magic. You flip the egg, watching as the translucent liquid turns opaque, before sliding it onto your breakfast plate. Your hands are a work of art, the ultimate multi-tool, that our device wishes it was.

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Unfortunately, while our body is a complex biomechanical system that has been refined over millions of years of evolution, this group only started learning about engineering design last week, so we’ll have to settle for something a little simpler.

Cracking an egg mechanically will require several actions to be performed in sequence. The egg will first have to be cracked, before the shells are separated and removed. It sounds simple, but that’s because we’ve taken for granted our ability to freely manipulate objects and the amount of forced used when interacting with them.

In reality, it’s not so simple.