More on Robotic Muscles

Someone sent me this earlier (cool, I love being sent stuff)

Which is possibly the weirdest robo-thing I’ve seen… like, ever.

Pity it’s pneumatic… because pneumatics need compressors, and compressors are big and heavy and hungry. Still… wow.

Anyway, that inspired me to look up all the new robo-muscles on youtube.

And yes, they’re all slightly disturbing

A lot of them seem to be made out of that memory metal. I have my doubts about this stuff… because I can remember Omni magazine going on about it back at about the same time that Star-Wars came out – and not a hell of a lot as happened with it since.

Although someone has managed to make a glider that uses them to fly into the light:

This one is driven by dielectric elastomers.

… and for those of you who don’t know what dielectric elastomers actually are…

neither do I.

But they’re used to steer this blimp:

So um… there you go. That was a dismissively brief post given the amount of stuff that appears to be going on… A lot of the videos seem to be coming from this… http://www.environmental-robots.com/… which has loads of memory-metal videos etc… and a website that at times seems to show the classic signs of memetic addiction.

But a lack of polish is generally a good thing I think… when people starting to compete on polish generally indicates that the ideas have run out.