Tesla Bot to use 126 Actuators each just like this one from FIRGELLI
For a Robot to have any level of precision they are going to need to have feedback control. And they need to be small and hold enough power to be able to do something useful. FIRGELLI have been making Actuators for 20 years, and these Micro Actuators are their latest generation of Actuators offering positional control aimed squarely at the Tesla Bot territory.
Tesla FIRGELLI Micro Actuators
Tesla are not the only ones working on humanoid style Robots, in fact Sony have been working on them for 50 years with little success to create anything worthy of been adopted into your family to do the house chores. So If Sony have not been able to manage anything adoption worthy then what makes Tesla think they can in just 2 years? Well Not they cannot, as you will see their was just more theatrical marketing techniques done by Elon Musk to build the excitement and help the stock price, but this doesn’t mean to say he’s not going to try and will not produce something worthwhile. The main challenge is going to be power to size ratio of Actuators. With Cars their problem has always been power to weight ratio, but with Robots it’s going to be a power to size problem. You see for Robots to be maneuverable and fit into a regular car or elevator, they are going to need to be no bigger than a regular human, but at the same time have similar lifting capacities. And that’s where the human muscles are exceptionally efficient and powerful for their size. Consider how much grip you have in your fingers. Enough to momentary hold your entire weight if you hang off a pull up bar, yet those muscles to control your fingers are actually located in your arms, and don’t actually take up much space either. Only your thumb has muscles in the hand, but non of our fingers have muscles in them. Evolution has made it this way because otherwise our fingers would be too fat and bulky to be able to do anything useful with them.
So where to Actuators come into this?
A Tesla Bot design is going to have to take a similar approach to motion control as our evolutionary humans, and that is move the muscles to somewhere more manageable if they are going to make Robots have any sort of power density as a human. Sony and other large companies approach has been the opposite. They use servo (Rotary Actuators) which rotate a joint at the actual joint which leads to Bikki ness issues.
I think Tesla will copy the human body design and adopt Micro Linear Actuators like this one. They are compact and small and work on a linear motion jist like a human muscle
The future will be interesting that’s for sure and watching which direction these companies take will be even more interesting. Let’s Watch the race unfold
Author: Robbie Dickson