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@martinus Hello cat.

Visually the TARS/CASE/KIPP design is quite a long way from this – the “bush robot” Hans Moravec proposed in his bonkers 1988 “Mind Children” – but if we allow for continuing fractal decomposition of the manipulators as we move distally, conceptually it’s not a million miles away. Here’s a 1999 paper on “fractal branching ultra-dexterous robots” Moravec submitted to NASA’s Advanced Concepts Research Projects division.

https://web.archive.org/web/20161220070307/https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/1999/NASA.report.99/9901.NASA.html

First off: TARS (CASE/KIPP): only good robot.

For all the pleasingly monolithic slabbery of his design, the thing I find most intriguing about TARS is the suggestion we get of the way at least some of his appendages decompose into increasingly fine-grained manipulators in distal extension. Other than the mass/bulk of the necessary actuators, there’s nothing to say this decomposition might not extend fractally, to sub-millimeter scales, giving him extremely granular motor control.