Oil-filled 'muscles' give this robot leg a spring in its step

Researchers are always looking for new ways to improve the agility, performance, and efficiency of walking robots. Most of the time, this focus has centered on motor advancements. But a team at ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) is focused on an alternative approach--artificial, electrostatically-powered musculature inspired by animal biology and human anatomy. Both two- and four-legged robots have become pretty agile over the past few years thanks to design advancements in motor technologies and artificial intelligence. For many of them, however, energy requirements and costs remain a major hurdle, especially when it comes to AI systems needed to interpret vast quantities of environmental sensor data.