Puppets on a string

There’s one mechanical element that most people use every day and have been doing so for over 10,000 years. It’s cheap, easy to handle and, thanks to ongoing research, it has become even stronger and more lightweight over the millennia. This element is the cable, present versions of which have superb properties. For nearly twenty years, a community of engineering researchers has been using simple cables for sophisticated purposes, to develop and build extremely large and fast robots that open up new branches of automation.