After seeing the Bartender sample, I'm convinced that this is significant to improving small scale robotic arms. Now the arm does not have to be rock solid, and it's precise enough to do simple tasks. For more sophisticated arms, this can increase their speed/extend their capability. This can even help in exploiting the flexibility of the material, for throwing/catapulting stuff for example. Exciting!
Maybe. One of the issues is these seem to depend on having a very accurate model of the animatronic models and how their materials will react to forces so that the required damping motions can be baked into the model.
