/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7409487
I don't know about efficiency, but rotaxane based artificial muscles currently exceed regular muscles in some aspects. While muscle sarcomeres can achieve a strain of 8%, rotaxane based artificial muscles can achieve a strain of 67%!

In addition, if rotaxane based artificial muscles could be arranged into some sort of structured polymer, it might be possible to make a muscle capable of lifting a ton per centimeter^2 of muscle area.

Unfortunately, synthesizing rotaxanes is really hard, yields are low, and we've yet to find a good way to make them into long fibers to do this. These are real 'nano' machines though.

>>7409589
Well if they were rotaxane based artificial muscles, they'd get worse with every use. It's gonna be quite a while before we can make stuff that can self-heal.

>>7201878
Artificial muscle guy here, probably not soon and for robot bodies we don't really need it. Rotary electric actuators are amazing and will never be replaced by artificial muscles except in niche applications. For robots and stuff you really want rotary motion not linear motion like a muscle would provide.

>>7201987
it would be incredibly hard to copy our own design. Muscle is literally made up of a bunch of nanomachines.

Which brings us to how long will it take to get nice strong efficient artificial muscles. We have artificial muscles that are probably better than what exists in nature. Pic related can contract more than natural muscles while producing more force(scaled of course). Problem is, they can't be very big, pic related is just a single molecule. They can be synthesized into chains, but as of yet we can't really synthesize them into very long chains. And for the time being, it doesn't look like we'll be able to make macroscopic chains of them any time soon. In addition we can't make them in high yields.

Although if we could make them into nice stiff bundles, they would find practical use even at these low yields. If we could do this, we would probably be able to make bundles that were stiff enough such that the positional uncertainty due to thermal fluctuations would be on the order of angstroms or less. Which means we could use them to build tiny robot arms capable of moving individual atoms around accurately enough to do atomically precise manufacturing.

TL;DR we'll probably have nanofactories sooner than artificial muscle

>>7202039
haha no, those nylon artificial muscles are super inefficient and have bad hysteresis problems, because they're heat engines and heat engines suck.
>>7202042
because if you built a sex robot using those artificial muscles, it'd probably burn you