Tech: A Micro-muscle breakthrough

[Svengli]

"A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds — faster than the blink of an eye."

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases ... k-through/

A commenter on the tech board I follow said that if this power-level could scale, it would allow humanoid robot strong enough to carry their own power supplies.

Much more needs doing but this seems quite useful

[N6688]

this could be a valuable breakthrough.
no more servos needed.