A friend at work brought my attention back to a delightful essay Rodney Brooks wrote back in the late 80s.

Talking about how to get your robot to get to the right possition he outlines two approachs. One approach achieves solid top-down control, the other is extremely adaptive and dynamic. He is and was a strong advocate of systems with their design centered in the second approach and ridcules the first approach:

“Manipulator to payload mass ratios of 100 to 1 are almost the rule and ratios of 1000 to 1 are not unheard of. Compare this to the human arm.”

Some institutions are like that.