Feb 21, 2025 10:40 PM IST
A US firm has released Protoclone, the world’s first bipedal, muscuskeletal android. The video of the robot has since gone viral.
US-based robotics company Clone has released a video showing its latest product Protoclone, the world’s first bipedal, musculoskeletal android. The company described the robot as a “faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and 500 sensors”.
The video showed the robot hanging from a wire and moving its legs and arms in human-like movements. The robot has a muscular system which animates the human skeleton using the company’s artificial muscle technology Myofiber.
Will Protoclone bleed too?
Reacting to the company’s video showing the robot, an X user said, “Please tell me the average human can kill this thing with a bat.” Responding to this, Clone CEO Dhanush Rad said, “You can stab it with a fork and it will bleed out.”
Rad also called the robot “ground zero for the age of androids”.
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Netizens say robot has ‘come to life’
Reacting to the video, several people expressed shock at the striking similarity the robot’s movements had to those of a human.
“This is wild. It is like watching science fiction come to life – what’s its next move?” an X user said. Another called the video the “opening scene for a horror movie”. A third user jokingly talked about its similarity to humans and said, “Sure this is not some guy hanging there doing the robot?”
A user likened the video to the famous sci-fi movie Terminator Salvation. “Sci-fi authors tried to warn us about stuff like this,” an X user said.
What is special about Protoclone?
The company claims that the robot has synthetic organ systems and a biomorphic design along with Myofibers that contract faster than human, skeletal muscle fibers.
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Clone’s revolutionary artificial muscle technology ‘Myofiber’ is produced in monolithic musculotendon units to eliminate tendon failures.
“In order to obtain the desirable qualities of mammalian skeletal muscle, a suitable synthetic muscle fiber should respond in less than 50 ms with a bigger than 30% unloaded contraction and at least a kilogram of contraction force for a single, three gram muscle fiber. Today, Myofiber is the only artificial muscle in the world capable of achieving such a combination of weight, power density, speed, force-to-weight, and energy efficiency,” Clone’s website reads.
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