Humans have created many technologies to produce motion. Motors, gears, pistons, compressors - these inventions are remarkable achievements, yet they are all inferior to motion designs found in nature.

 

Rigid metal parts that pop, grind, or whine cause problems and tradeoffs that must be separately mitigated. These traditional technologies are expensive, inefficient, loud, heavy, and complex.

 

Instead of continuing down the path of slow and rigid metal-based technology, humans should leverage nature’s hard work and develop soft motion technologies more similar to natural muscles.

 

Robotics and automation technologies have demonstrated rapid advances in software, vision, and control, but the enabling hardware technology has not kept up. These advances have opened the door to virtual worlds, yet our methods of interacting with those virtual worlds are primitive.