The humanoid “robots” that walk, talk, and screw around in shows like HBO’s Westworld are unsettlingly realistic, largely because of how they move . Their smooth, lifelike motions, coupled with the premise that they are machines, put them firmly in the uncanny valley . We’re used to spastic robots like the fictional R2-D2 or the real-life Pepper — cute, stuttering machines with endearingly clumsy moves are the robots we know and love.
But new synthetic muscle developed by researchers at Columbia University in New York looks to be the next step toward smooth-moving machines becoming part of our reality. In […]
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