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Robots have bearings and simple, efficient rotary electric motors. A machinists lathe is a fantastic piece of technology. We're really good at building things that rotate.

Nature uses cellular-scale nanotechnology to build millions of microscopic linear motors. We can build linear electric motors by essentially unrolling the stator, but they're on a much larger scale.

We get better results with servomotors, either installed with some gear reduction at a pivot joint, or hooked to a ballscrew linear actuator.




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