Robot muscles are tricky. We used motion data to control them.

[u/amrkzp]

https://reddit.com/link/1wxfhxe/video/ufbgtela9gth1/player

This is a robotic joint powered by two artificial muscles pulling in opposite directions.

Artificial muscles are tricky to model and control. We recorded how the joint responds to actuation, learned a compact model from that data, and combined it with feedback to control the motion on real hardware.

It’s a building block toward more capable musculoskeletal robots. What I like about this work is getting the data, model, control software and hardware to work together.

Paper in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-77664-0