A Micro-Muscular Breakthrough | Hacker News Reader

A Micro-Muscular Breakthrough

newscenter.lbl.gov

81 pointsmacrebel11 comments

Ok, if this : "energy power density up to approximately 39 kilowatts/kilogram" holds up, it will change things dramatically. At that power density you can build walking robots which are humanoid and faster and more powerful with enough weight budget left over to carry along power packs. Thanks for the link.

Would be very surprised if Boston Dynamics (and their Google overlords) are not already eyeing this tech with great interest.

That also depends on the efficiency. If this requires twice the power as input that it produces mechanically, those power packs would become a lot larger.

I skimmed the paper at http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-AdvMat-201..., but could not find anything about efficiency. that 68 degrees Celsius switching temperature does give me some concerns, though (hm. Bring it to 37 degrees, and this might become very useful for people with muscular dystrophy. Or does that show even more that ik don't really know what I am talking about?)

Are you kidding me, I can RENT access to this paper for only 40 hours?

This research is conducted with public funding!

Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy. Grant Number: DE-AC02–05CH11231

AFOSR. Grant Number: 9550-13-1-0136

The current research publication situation is completely ridiculous, and I'm not sure how it can be fixed.

I was a bit miffed by that as well. I am going to check with my local library and see if I can get access. Many of the more popular ones are available for "digital checkout". The next stop will be a local university!

Would this be the paper? http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-AdvMat-201...

I found it on the author's web page, linked in the news article. But I'm not able to open it.

Ah, that is a manuscript draft, but does seem to contain the correct information.

This breakthrough could be what the car was to the carriage if they can find scalable ways to advance the manufacturing process. Based on the video, it does not look like the technical limitations are great. I wonder what this would look like in the form of a solar or thermal energy transfer method - i.e. solar to mechanical at astronomical energy efficiency levels.

I expect there is a lot of MEMS value at the current size, but is there good reason to believe it will scale?

The main reason to believe that is that nine times out of ten a lab finds something out and announces it to the world, as has been done here, it ends up being infeasible to manufacture. There are about a willion "revolutionary new battery technology" announcements for every one that hits production.

Would this be useful for developing really strong and accurate micro-manipulators or am I misunderstanding the claims?

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