To make it fly, we have to build something robotics still does not have: lightweight, distributed, fault-tolerant muscle.
Quetzalcoatlus was one of the largest animals ever to fly, and it was found in Texas. It solved one of engineering's hardest problems: getting a body the size of a small aircraft off the ground under its own power, with no runway, no engine, and no rare-earth magnet anywhere in it.
Then it was interrupted. Its lineage ended 66 million years ago. Nothing since, no animal, no aircraft, no robot, has replicated muscle-powered flight at that scale.
Reproduce the system that made this possible and you have solved a problem much larger than flight.
We can build the skeleton.
We can build the computers.
We can build the batteries.
Every robot on Earth still concentrates force, mass, and failure into a handful of motorized or hydraulic joints. 66M builds the alternative: force generated by thousands of contractile fibers pulling through a shared tendon, so a failed fiber costs a little force, not the limb.
Two machines, one muscle. The pterosaur is the hardest proof we could pick. The arm is how robots will buy it.
A 6 ft pterosaur that crouches, vaults off a ledge, opens its wings and glides, the way Quetzalcoatlus left the ground. No motor drives the launch. All the energy comes from stored muscle cartridges.
Two 66M cartridges bolt onto a humanoid arm as a bicep and a triceps, with no drilling. The elbow sweeps from straight to fully bent and back, carrying 2 kg in the hand.
Concept animations from our CAD and design targets. Not test footage.
We start with the big, explosive movements in a robot: legs, hips, arms. Muscle that works in bursts suits them, and they are where the most magnet mass sits. First customers are humanoid, defense and field robotics teams.
Tell us the joint, the force and stroke it needs, your mass budget and duty cycle. We will tell you honestly whether a cartridge fits.
Robotics teams test and integrate the muscle against their own force, cycle-life, mass and control requirements.
Muscle sold into robots and kept running in the field.
Others build our muscle into their machines.
We are a systems company, not a fiber lab. The cartridge is built so whichever fiber wins goes in it.
The muscle a pterosaur needs is the same muscle robotics needs today, and the magnets it replaces are running into a wall.
Global rare-earth magnet demand by 2030, rising to 175k t by 2050.
Share of the world's sintered permanent magnets made in a single foreign country in 2024, up from about 50% in 2005.
US defense rules bar magnet material from that foreign supply chain, from mine to finished magnet.
Sources: IEA, Rare Earth Elements (94%) · Rare Earth Exchanges, DFARS 2027. t = metric tonnes.
Demonstrator 1 climbs a ladder. Each rung asks more of the muscle than the one before.
Cartridges for the big, explosive movements in a robot: legs, hips, arms. How customers respond tells us whether to scale big muscles or move to hands.
A 60-inch pterosaur that shapes its wings like an animal and soars on rising air instead of carrying big batteries. A flight we want to make: Houston to NASA's Johnson Space Center, scored by how little energy it took.
A Quetzalcoatlus-class machine that carries a person. Nobody rides until the safety case says they can.
Robotics teams evaluating actuators, research groups, investors, press. Tell us what you are working on and we will come back to you.
Reach out to
luis@66-m.comEngineering development supported by SOLIDWORKS for Startups.