Question: what is the most interesting development in robotics that is happening at the moment

LauraAnne Furlong answered on 14 Nov 2016:

There are lots of really interesting things happening! To me, I think the most exciting is the idea of ‘biologically inspired engineering’. The human body is an amazing machine to move us around the place and most of the time it performs its job very well (it doesn’t if you were injured for example). The idea behind biologically inspired engineering for robotics and prosthetics is that we develop technology that mimics the behaviour of muscles and tendons in the body as closely as possible; we make modern technology that is based on how the body would have made it. The idea behind this is to make movements as energy efficient and human-like as possible. This clip is from a group in the US at North Carolina State University, who use very similar methods to what I do to look at muscle and tendon in your legs as you walk or run. Drs Sawicki and Farris give a very nice talk about the background to this area:

Up to the last 5-10 years, we simply didn’t have the technology to investigate how muscles and tendons work in the body during walking and running for example, nor did we have the materials we now have to build the technology. Now we do, and technology is continuing to advance. Scientists now work more with scientists with knowledge in other areas, e.g. people who work in human movement work with those from computer science and materials, and working as a group, they have much bigger capabilities to do more difficult and advanced analysis on their data so they can find out more information which may be more useful to design. These are all very exciting developments in the area, and we will see a lot more of this type of work in the future.