Wearable Muscles
My immediate thought was: We could use those to power wings and fly!<p>You see, I spent the last weeks reading up on Otto Lilienthal. And while we might think that we have already "cracked" flying, we actually haven't. Humans still cannot fly. We can only board. What we do not have achieved is the sense of "flying like a bird", which Lilienthal was after. The idea that you control your movements through the air directly, not mediated through knobs and buttons, but by using your own body.<p>Motors that provide rotational power are not suited for wings. The are suited only to propellers. So that's where artificial muscles perhaps would be able to shine.<p>Also, I imagine that a bird needs to have fine-grained sense perception in its wings, to be able to compensate for subtle differences in air speed and pressure. And it seems that this is something these researchers are doing as well, with those sensors embedded in the fabric.