IT WON’T CREATE the kind of cyborg that’ll show up on your doorstep in sunglasses and a leather jacket, claiming to be from the future and intoning one-liners, but the $18.5 million the UW just bagged from the National Science Foundation will no doubt lead to some impressive robotics. The school—along with MIT and San Diego State University—is tasked with establishing and maintaining the Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering. That’s geek-speak for, well, let’s let the center’s director, Yoky Matasuoka, explain: “It will combine advances in robotics, neuroscience, electromechanical devices, and computer science to restore or augment the body’s ability for sensation and movement.”