Why robots are best held together by bits of string

You can see the bungee controls among the wire ‘nerves’ in the close-up of the robot Cronos's hand below. Some are tensioned very taut, and others are relatively slack.

The idea of using elastic instead of rigid links seems odd at first sight. But researcher Richard Newcombe says our own muscles behave like rubber bands and elasticity has its advantages.

“It can store the energy and release it in a way that is more efficient, or more dynamically desirable, for the sort of control that you want. You get this in the legs of all animals.”

High jumpers make use of the effect “with all their dancing about before a jump”, said Professor Owen Holland. “It is pre-tensioning the muscle. And what you are seeing when they go up is not just their muscular effort, it is the energy they had stored in the run up as well.”

Another advantage, apparently, is that Cronos feels very human when, say, you shake hands with it, and its whole body may be involved in even simple movement. I was not able to experience this because Cronos was being worked on during my visit.

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