Talk:Artificial muscle

This article could use a more careful comparison of the capabilities and limitations of the various kinds of artificial muscles. I.e., numbers and charts. If the fishing line actuators are really hundreds of times more powerful than human muscles, why aren't there already a bunch of super-robots running around? The answer, obviously, is that there is a lot more hype in this article than actual useful data, and in fact none of the currently available artificial muscles even come close to the real-world performance of conventional hydraulic and electric actuators, or muscle for that matter. Generally speaking, the fast and potentially efficient polymer actuators are weak, and the thermally-actuated fibers (nitinol, nylon, etc.) are slow and inefficient. You might be able to heat them up quickly with electric resistance heating, but how are you going to cool them off again just as quickly? There are some interesting applications for slow, powerful, inefficient fibers, but they aren't widely useful. 128.253.227.246 (talk) 14:17, 6 January 2017 (UTC)