I always have these great ideas, and very often five to ten years after the conception of that bright idea, I see it come to fruition. One such example is the ECCEROBOT. I always thought that it was silly to use anything but an emulation of natural body mechanics of the human when trying to create realistic robotics. If you want a robot to move like a human, why not use muscles and tendons the way that humans do? Rather than using some actuating motor for an elbow joint, which results in a very, well, robotic motion, why not emulate the contraction of the biceps and all that? I thought the same thing for robotic vision: if humans have two eyes, and our brain process three dimensions with the use of binocular vision, then robots should too. After all, nature has a way of perfecting things over thousands of years of evolution: why reinvent the wheel?
Of course I'm no engineer, so I have no clue what the technical limitations are and why certain things can't be implemented, but hey, I sure can dream and scheme like da Vinci did. Perhaps I'll pick up mechanical engineering as a hobby.
Imitating the muscular action of living things would be extremely difficult, you'd probably need super sophisticated nanotechnology to assemble something like that, if you consider the fact that it involves a great deal of tiny subcellular machinery.
Well, all I was really talking about was the basic mechanics of human motion. For example, take the curling of the arm, as in a barbell curl. That would be the contraction of the bicep and perhaps the forearm flexor muscles, though that's extremely simplified as I'm sure there are many many more muscles involved in that one action.
My idea was not to grow muscle tissue for use in robotics, but to use nature as a template. The video basically explains how I envisioned more human-like movement: ECCEROBOT uses shock cord for muscles and kiteline for tendons. Because shock cord and kiteline has no inherent ability to expand or contract itself, it must use motors for actuation. But it's a start in the right direction.
My idea was to use nature as a basic inspiration, to model the mechanics off nature, but not to copy and clone from on a molecular level.
I never said it was easy, but often I wonder why people didn't start looking at nature for inspiration in the first place. Well, maybe they did, but in this one particular case of the ECCEROBOT, the equipment and materials have existed for long enough (they state they use off the shelf components in the video) so that it can't be chalked up to just a lack of technology.