I'm really excited to see what smaller and more powerful motors combined with increasingly dense battery technology does for robotics. Anyone with knowledge or expertise care to predict the next 10 years?
I don't think we're close to the limits yet of how many kilowatts we can pack into a defined weight/volume.
For example, one could imagine a motor having many 'onion layers' from outside to inside, where half of the layers are stationary, and half move. Magnetic fields between the layers cause the torque. By making many smaller layers, magnetic flux paths are shorter, and therefore less metal is needed for a given pulling force, and hence less space.
Current motors have just two layers (rotor and stator), but in future motors with 10+ layers, total power in a given space will be very high - the only limit really will be cost and difficulty of manufacture, especially of complex bearing sets required to keep all the layers concentric.
Eventually, motors will become small and light enough that they get integrated into wheels, and suddenly car design will be dramatically simplified.
