Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for bio-inspired soft robotics maintenance in hybrid quantum-classical pipelines Introduction: A Detour That Changed How I Think About Robot Maintenance Six months ago, I was deep into a rabbit hole studying knowledge distillation for a completely different reason — I wanted to compress a large vision transformer into something that could run on a microcontroller for a home automation project. Somewhere around 2 AM, while reading a paper on cro...