I think they just took a concept figured out in 1994 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8) and applied it to

I think they just took a concept figured out in 1994 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8) and applied it to robots, in an attempt to get an easy publication written up. Really, though, we know we can make robot parts. The hard part is the software. What these people did by making it robotic was completely pointless (because making the robots is a huge amount of unnecessary added work) that doesn't add to our knowledge until we can solve all the software problems in simulations first.