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It’s going to be extremely exciting when a group figures out artificial muscles that can be actuated electrically with high efficiency and speed.

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I feel the same way.

The clumsy replication we currently use of cables held under torsion using servos would be replaced instantly.

The kinds of actuation we'd be able to produce would only be rivaled by nature.

Servos and cables are going to drastically outperform these artificial muscles, though.

Only high performance hydraulics exceeds that.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aar3276

This is some really cool work in that direction. Very high voltages though as usual.

I've been wondering why we don't fabricate huge arrays or stacks of miniature versions of these. The voltage requirements should go down as the size decreases, right? Does some other aspect not scale well?

There are electrostatic MEMs devices so it would scale well with a flexible material and the dielectric inserted in some way. These smaller devices are lower voltage (90-100V versus 6-10kV in the above) and require the use of a converter. The current is virtually zero for both though.

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