Humanoid robots from Tesla, Figure.AI, and Boston Dynamics are currently receiving a lot of attention from experts and the interested public, and the progress they are making is impressive. But they have one thing in common: they are all quite stiff robots, with 300 to more than a thousand components, including many electric motors, cables, and hydraulic valves that move them. This poses certain challenges in terms of safety and reliability, because no one wants to collide with or get caught in such a robot, or have to repair a part yet again.

But there are other approaches to moving robots, and Clone Robotics from Wroclaw, Poland, is trying one of them. The young company is developing a so-called musculoskeletal robot consisting of hundreds of tubes. Anastasiia Nosova managed to get an interview with the co-founder and CEO of Clone Robotics, Dahanush Radhakrishnan, to talk about the technology and the company’s goals. In the first video, she explains how the technology works and how the company was founded. In the second video, she talks with Dahanush about the company, the current situation, and their goals.

Musculoskeletal robots are modeled on the human body and how muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints work together. The artificial McKibben muscle is used, which is essentially a tube in a wire mesh into which air or liquid is pumped. When air or liquid is pumped into it, the tube inflates and the wire mesh shortens the length of the tube. This allows high forces to be transmitted very quickly and also very slowly with great precision.

But take a look at the two videos.